Is it just my perception or has Meta become cool again by sharing a ton of research and open source (or open weights) work?
Facebook's reputation was at the bottom, but now it seems like they made up for it.
Facebook's reputation was at the bottom, but now it seems like they made up for it.
Facebook the social network reputation may be not shiny, but Meta the engineering company reputation is pretty high, to my mind.
It's somehow similar to IBM, who may look not stellar as a hardware or software solutions provider, but still have quite cool research and microelectronics branches.
Microsoft Research also puts out some really cool stuff, but that does not mean the "same" Microsoft can't show ads in their OS' start menu for people's constant enjoyment. I noticed this interesting discrepancy in Microsoft some years ago as a teenager; it does not surprise me at all that Facebook has a division doing cool things (zstandard, etc.) and a completely separate set of people working towards completely different goals simultaneously. Probably most companies larger than a couple hundred people have such departmental discrepancies
I found exactly zero things that they have provided to the world. Literally none, and I really came in with an open mind. All I found was marketer drivel telling me how I should feel about the impact of the marketing copy I was currently reading. No concrete examples after fanning out 3 links deep into every article posted on that site. I must be missing something so can you point me to at least one example of work that’s come out of Microsoft Research on the same scale as Meta’s LLM models or ReactJS?
You could look at their blog: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/
Or their list of publications: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/
Here's a (no longer updated, apparently) list of awards given to researchers at Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/awards-archive/
I've heard in interviews that MSR's culture is not what it used to be (like Bell Labs, maybe), but over time they've funded a ton of highly influential research.
(Also on top of my head DeepSpeed is by MSR, which is used a lot in large scale ML training.)
Z3 is a very popular open source SMT solver, also originating from MSR.
There's probably dozens of similar examples. You might not know about some of the work coming out of MSR, but it's probably impacting you indirectly.
It's similar to how we indirectly benefit from fundamental nuclear physics. Places like CERN have to solve engineering issues and those solutions trickle down to everyone.
I would say that I have a very unfavorable opinion of Meta in terms of their commitment to privacy, security, and social responsibility.
I ran across this interesting graphic recently:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/4/23987953/the-gpu-haves-an...
Suddenly facebook is useful as a search engine..
Also interesting is that Meta AI is much faster than ChatGPT from end-user's point of view, but results not quite as good. Here is a comparison:
Or you can recognise that ‘Meta’ isn’t a conscious entity, and that it’s perfectly likely that there are some people over there doing amazing open-source work, and different people over there making ethically dubious decisions when building their LLMs.
I’ve worked for dozens of organisations in my career. Large and small, competent and not. Usually not.
In that time did I make some ‘ethically correct’ choice to leave an enormous organisation because some other part of that organisation did something that wasn’t ethically perfect?
Never. Not one time.
And I’m an ethical person. I consider this stuff deeply. Here I am bothering to have this conversation with you.
But, what, every person who has an interesting job doing good things — remember, we’re talking about engineers developing a new audio codec — so those people who have interesting jobs doing good things with a great team are expected to look over there to some distant part of the org, to teams they’re barely aware of, let alone have spoken to, and they’re expected to quit their jobs because of the ‘ethically dubious’ stuff going on over there?
Sorry. Unrealistic, idealistic bullshit. I’ve never done it and neither have you.
I guess I don't really feel that you can just say you're an ethical person and have it absolve yourself of impact of your work.
It doesn't seem a stretch to say that the goals of meta are propagated by the things meta focuses work on, and even if one isn't on the forefront of stealing data, intruding on privacy, or maximizing engagement at all costs, doesn't mean nothing they do will play a part in those teams.
At the end of the day, even accounting at the orphan crushing factory plays a part in the orphan crushing machine.
compare that to Angular and TensorFlow, such a difference in culture
And GraphQL, Relay, Stylex...
Ah yes, the <body id="app"></body> websites.
Look, I'm seeing an increase of blogs made with an implication that _infinity_ amount of visits requires less resources than one and I don't just find it true.
(https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md#co...)
The linker? How is facebook involved in that?
I wish the author could see that, and if the case is valid, to provide it, instead of some pretty tenuous claims of connection strung together to lead up to a demand for money.
I did try to go to the link that evidenced the "multiple" times Facebook was contacted in a 5 year period, but I couldn't get through. How many times was it, for anyone who can?
Read the report, gather data, then criticize it.
This is the core of your point and a comment on the idea itself, not the way the article portrayed it. I think it's fare to characterize your dismissal as glib.
Good luck undoing that releasing codecs haha
[0] https://time.com/4930532/facebook-russian-accounts-2016-elec...