I fail to see how LLMs are a complement to Meta's products?
They have masses of content generated for free by users and journalists and influencers and so on - if anything, a bunch of LLM spam is a threat to that.
However, Open-weights LLMs are a much smaller threat to Facebook than they are to Google (where it could replace a lot of search usage) or Open AI (whose business is selling LLM access)
Perhaps for Facebook the benefits of the open weights approach - where you give away the model and get back a load of somewhat improved models, a faster way of running it, and a load of experienced potential hires - pays off because it doesn't threaten their core business.
This is an overly narrow view of what an LLM can do. Generating text is the really neat parlor trick that people are trying to cram in to every possible startup, but if you take a broader view then what LLMs really are is the single largest breakthrough in natural language understanding.
Facebook doesn't need text generators, but they do need language understanding, especially for recommendation and moderation.
I'm not convinced that it's a complement—Joel's explanation is that you make a product that users consume alongside yours very cheap in order to keep people coming to you— but they definitely need LLMs.
The GPU cluster that they trained their Llama models on was actually built to train Reelz (their TikTok competitor) to recognize video content for recommendation purposes, which is the thing that TikTok does so well - figuring out users' preferences.
> A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants.
LLMs aren't really a complement like gas to cars because the end user doesn't need to consume the LLM in order to use the social media site. It's more like LLMs are becoming an essential component of a social media site—not like gas to cars but like an engine control unit, a part that ideally the user will never see or interact with. Joel's reasoning doesn't apply to that kind of product because users don't see the price of LLMs as a barrier to consumption of social media.
For instance, an Instagram account that shows cool AI generated photos generates ad revenue for Meta.