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Comment by ozr | Hacker News Reader

If your product is an AI model (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) you can't give it away for free.

If your product is a social graph w/ ads (Meta), you can.

It's hardly corporate charity:

* Meta releasing these models creates an improvement and tuning ecosystem around it, giving them access to tons of free developer time.

* It's also a strong recruiting tool, for engineers and researchers frustrated by, e.g., Google and OpenAI becoming increasingly closed. They know they can publish at Meta.

* The cost is insignificant. Meta had 30B in revenue just in Q2 2023.

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It's great PR. I hear people refer to Mark Zuckerberg as a "real engineer" and other such platitudes and it's doing wonders to reduce the stigma around Meta amongst the tech savvy minority.

Despite Meta being very similar to Google in terms of incentives, and Google nowadays being decidedly uncool. Doesn't hurt that Mark shipped something worth a damn whereas Google has been floundering for ages.

With credit to Google, they were basically neck-and-neck with Facebook AI Research in a lot of ways. Both were publishing text transformers (BERT vs FastText), both were maintaining SOTA inference libraries (Tensorflow vs Pytorch) and both were investing heavily into researching the field further. I'd even argue that Google was the largest contributor to making open-source AI more like Linux and less like a shitty proprietary product.

There's a whole history of recent machine-learning development where both Google and Facebook have worked together and against each other to push things forward. I think it's entirely mistaken to characterize Google as the understudy when in many ways it's the other way around.

I mean I have been watching what Google has been doing in AI with wonder for ages and do agree that they seem to be rather underrated merely because they've recently been caught on the back foot.

At the end of the day though I use Llama and I use GPT4 and I don't use Bard. Google has an amazing legacy around AI but it really hasn't been performing in the last couple of years. I can imagine they'll have a comeback, but one does wonder if Google has lost their mojo.

How is it that Zuckerberg is suddenly an "engineer"? He's a CEO, but just because you run a business, does not mean you actually do any of the underlying technical work. Are they blind to the emperor's clothing?

He's obviously not closing Jira tickets at Meta, but that doesn't mean he's not an engineer. As an example of the positive impact that the Llama releases have had, this post from him has been doing the rounds lately in response to criticsm like yours:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/775294156352065/

Commoditize your complement and all that.

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