I suppose if there's any consolation for the open-source AI community it's that Meta has demonstrated a willingness to burn a lot of money for unclear benefit, they're still single-handedly keeping the VR industry on life support at the expense of about $4 billion per quarter. A decade on from acquiring Oculus and no closer to making it profitable, if Metas AI efforts get the same treatment then the free models will probably keep coming for a while.
IIRC,
- Having a better model is a competitive advantage in fighting against spam - Better models enables facebook itself to understand their code vulnerabilities, better employee productivity etc. - Being in the frontier of open source, keeps them at an advantage in terms of updates from community
They’re highly incentivized to expand the options for generating content. OpenAI and Anthropic have to make money from the generation, which raises the barrier to creation. Meta can say fuck it, let everyone create and well sell ads against what they create.