That's all very nice and good, but Meta keeps things open (for now) because it's perfectly aligned with their business goals. It couldn't have happened any other way.
For the same reason Microsoft doesn't deserve credit for going all in on linux/open source when they did. They were doing it to stave off irrelevance that came from being out-competed by open source.
They were not doing it because they had a sudden "come to jesus" moment about how great open source was.
In both cases, it was a business decision being marketed as an ideological decision.
If they don't profit, then they don't have resources to do those things in addition to not being able to provide a livelihood for their workers.
However, they chose not to. And I assume the the history of e.g. android, pytorch and other open source technologies had a lot to do with it.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Morality aside, I do like the open source work coming out of Meta. It's possible for a company to be "bad guys" in one area, and "good guys" in another.
Basically it's accusing Meta of should have knowing that their algorithm and their user generated stickers was spreading this content.
Yes in an ideal world they should catch any campaign of this sort, but global moderation is difficult and they offer no proof that Meta knew about this.
It's disingenuous to say that Meta agitated this event. Those specific users of Meta agitated it and Meta did not catch it.
It really isn't, it just is expensive to do it. They could just hire people to do that. Thats the accusation. Of course they don't catch it if they don't try.
Meta (or TikTok or Twitter or any other social media company/product) can't both algorithmically create specific types of discourse (because higher engagement means more ad views) and deny responsiblity for the side effects of said discourse.
They're supposed to do good things all the time without praise. That's why society grants them the right to profit.
How?
I would have said a flood of LLM-generated spam is a pretty big threat to Facebook's business. Facebook don't seem to have any shortage of low/medium quality content; it's not like they need open-weights LLMs to increase the supply of listicles and quizzes, which are already plentiful. There isn't much of a metaverse angle either. And they risk regulatory scrutiny, because everyone else is lobotomising their models.
And if they wanted a flood of genai content - wouldn't they also want to release an image generation model, to ensure instagram gets the same 'benefits' ?
Sure there are some benefits to the open weights LLM approach that make them better at LLMs - I'm sure it makes it easier for them to hire people with LLM experience for example - but that's only helpful to the extent that Facebook needs LLMs. And maybe they'll manage to divert some of that talent to ad targeting or moderation - but that hardly seems 'perfectly aligned', more of a possible indirect benefit.