If Meta starts being all open and generous about their core assets, we can start talking. But we will not start talking. Because that will not happen.
I believe this statement is accurate. Your comment does not alter this fact and merely imposes an arbitrary requirement instead of giving credit where credit is due.
If another company were to openly share alternatives to Meta's core assets, I would welcome that as well.
If a restaurant chain with deep pockets opens a restaurant in your area and starts selling food at a loss (because they can afford to do so, at least short term) in order to kill your beloved local mom and pop restaurants, should they be praised for it? This is how Walmart built their empire destroying countless small family owned businesses. The difference in the AI business is the scale of the fight. There are just no good guys in this, Facebook or OpenAI.
This is just a ruthless commercial move, not done out of the goodness of Mark's heart.
We do have some legislation that tries to prevent businesses for selling things under the cost to combat this.
I read the Sam Walton autobiography and providing low cost goods with lots of options was one of the key benefits they provided smaller towns in Arkansas. The other chains couldn't operate at a profit due to the smaller customer base.
He was constantly trying to optimize his stores and dropping in on his locations daily. Because they were oroginally so far apart, in order to save driving time he learned to fly a plane and would just land in the field behind the store.
Constantly shopping competitors to see what they are doing better and how he could improve.
Originally store staff and towns welcomed the stores and him with open arms.
How times change.
Metas core asset is human attention. "Sharing" it means selling ads. I don't think there is an open model to that — just giving away access to users is probably not it — but that's only one of many problems with "sharing" attention.
Like I said, it won't happen (for various reasons). So while it's cool that in theory we just want everything to be more open, and celebrate Meta for doing that where they do, and asking for more where they don't, my original point stands.
I think they are pretty open about it?
- https://www.meta.ai/ requires no log in (for now at least)
- PyTorch is open source
- Various open models like LLama, Detectron, ELF, etc
- Various public datasets like FACET, MMCSG, etc
- A lot of research papers describing their findings
OP’s point was that Meta is being generous with other people’s business value (AI goodies), but not their own (content, graph, ads).
With Llama, they now have an army of people hacking on the llama architecture, so even if they don't explicitly use any of llama-adjacent projects, there are tons and tons of optimizations and other techniques being discovered. Just making up numbers, but if they spend x billions on interference per year and the open source community comes up with a way to make inference even just a few more percent efficient, the costs of their open source efforts might be a drop in comparison.
For example, Zuck was on the Dwarkesh podcast recently and mentioned that open sourcing OCP (server/rack design) has saved them billions because the industry standardized their designs, driving down the price for them.
Don't get me wrong: they are not doing this out of sheer generosity, but they are playing the long game of open sourcing core infrastructure.
Didn't React come from them? PyTorch?
For Amazon that's infrastructure. For OpenAI that's models.
For Meta, that's captured human lifetime/attention.
They release a lot of open source stuff as other commenters have mentioned but you can't build a Facebook or Instagram competitor just by integrating those components.
I don’t see it that way. Meta doesn’t have AI products, really, they have AI backend infrastructure. It’s like the Open Compute project for them, making their own infrastructure cheaper via openness, which seems perfectly cromulent to me. This could change.
Of course they’re doing good things out of self interest, but that’s how the system is supposed to work. It might even be preferable for us outside. Self interest tends to be more durable than altruism - particularly corporate altruism.
Companies like Meta use AI heavily for everything from recommendation engines to helping flag content.
It’s not true at all to say that Meta isn't the AI business. They’re one of the companies deploying AI at the largest scale out there.
There’s more to “AI” than LLMs and ChatGPT style chat interfaces.
I explore two counterpoints in my top level comment, check it out. One point is that AI can moderate content to respect user attention. This leaves less captive attention for Meta to extract.
Imagine a browser where every HTML element is judged, filtered, and refactored in real time by Asgard - an AI that jealously guards the user's precious attention. That could become a major threat to meta's attention business, overnight. And I love that!
Is that what it'll come to?
The implication is that Meta benefits from there being a lot of generative AI users out there producing content, because a rich marketplace of competing bots will generate engagement with Meta platforms that they can sell advertising into.
They’re outsourcing click generation to content farms, and giving away the tools to do it to keep content farmers’ moats small.