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Comment by rybosworld | Hacker News Reader

Huge companies like facebook will often argue for solutions that on the surface, seem to be in the public interest.

But I have strong doubts they (or any other company) actually believe what they are saying.

Here is the reality:

- Facebook is spending untold billions on GPU hardware.

- Facebook is arguing in favor of open sourcing the models, that they spent billions of dollars to generate, for free...?

It follows that companies with much smaller resources (money) will not be able to match what Facebook is doing. Seems like an attempt to kill off the competition (specifically, smaller organizations) before they can take root.

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I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta. Meta is scared of a world where they are locked out of LLM platforms, one where OpenAI gets to dictate rules around their use of the platform much like Apple and Google dictates rules around advertiser data and monetization on their mobile platforms. Small developers should be scared of a world where the only competitive LLMs are owned by those players too.

Through this lense, Meta’s actions make more sense to me. Why invest billions in VR/AR? The answer is simple, don’t get locked out of the next platform, maybe you can own the next one. Why invest in LLMs? Again, don’t get locked out. Google and OpenAi/Microsoft are far larger and ahead of Meta right now and Meta genuinely believes the best way to make sure they have an LLM they control is to make everyone else have an LLM they can control. That way community efforts are unified around their standard.

Sure, but don't you think the "not getting locked out" is just the pre-requisite for their eventual goal of locking everyone else out?

Does it really matter? Attributing goodwill to a company is like attributing goodwill to a spider that happens to clean up the bugs in your basement. Sure if they had the ability to, I'm confident Meta would try something like that, but they obviously don't, and will not for the foreseeable future.

I have faith they will continue to do what's in their best interests and if their best interests happen to align with mine, then I will support that. Just like how I don't bother killing the spider in my basement because it helps clean up the other bugs.

But you also know that the spider has been laying eggs so you better have an extermination plan ready.

Everyone is aware of that. No one thinks Facebook or Mark are some saint entities. But while the spider is doing some good deeds why not just go "yeah! go spider!". Once it becomes an asshole, we will kill it. People are not dumb.

It's not even truly open source, they set a user limit.

I'm not particularly concerned about the user limit. The companies for which those limits will matter are so large that they should consider contributing back to humanity by developing their own SOTA foundation models.

If by "everyone else" here you mean 3 or 4 large players trying to create a regulatory moat around themselves then I am fine with them getting locked out and not being able to create a moat for next 3 decades.

> I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta

Small guys are the ones being screwed over by AI companies and having their text/art/code stolen without any attribution or adherence to license. I don’t think Meta is on their side at all

That's a separate problem which affects small to large players alike (e.g. ScarJo).

Small companies interests are aligned with Meta as they are now on an equal footing with large incumbent players. They can now compete with a similarly sized team at a big tech company instead of that team + dozens of AI scientists

The reason for Meta making their model open source is rather simple: They receive an unimaginable amount of free labor, and their license only excludes their major competitors to ensure mass adoption without benefiting their competition (Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, etc). Public interest, philanthropy, etc are just nice little marketing bonuses as far as they're concerned (otherwise they wouldn't be including this licensing restriction).

All correct, Meta does obviously benefit.

It's helpful to also look at what do the developers and companies (everyone outside of top 5/10 big tech companies) get out of this. They get open access to weights of SOTA LLM models that take billions of dollars to train and 10s of billions a year to run the AI labs that make these. They get the freedom to fine tune them, to distill them, and to host them on their own hardware in whatever way works best for their products and services.

Interesting. So llama isn't actually open source! That would partially explain why they feel their moat isn't compromised.

Also... Wow, Mark Zuckerberg is such a liar! Implying that llama is open source when it isn't, while at the same time trying to gather the goodwill of FOSS developers.

Meta haven't made an open source model. They have released a binary with a proprietary but relatively liberal license. Binaries are not source and their license isn't free.

The model it's self isn't actually that valuable to facebook. The thing that's important is the dataset, the infrastructure and the people to make the models.

There is still, just about, a strong ethos( especially in the research teams) to chuck loads of stuff over the wall into opensource. (pytorch, detectron, SAM, aria etc)

but its seen internally as a two part strategy:

1) strong recruitment tool (come work with us, we've done cool things, and you'll be able to write papers)

2) seeding the research community with a common toolset.

Meta is, fundamentally, a user-generated-content distribution company.

Meta wants to make sure they commoditize their complements: they don’t want a world where OpenAI captures all the value of content generation, they want the cost of producing the best content to be as close to free as possible.

i was thinking along the same. A lot of content generated by LLMs is going to end up on Facebook or Instagram. The easier it is to create AI generated content the more content ends up on those applications.

Especially because genAI is a copyright laundering system. You can train it on copyrighted material and none of the content generated with it are copyright-able, which is perfect for social apps

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