Contra Zuckerberg on 'Open Source AI'
far.in.net
far.in.net
Zuckerberg wrote this as a shot against OpenAI. It’s a volley against the competition that sets them up for the fights to come. It’s a glorified shitpost and people are criticizing it for not quite being precise about open source.
It was never meant to be. Open source is not his audience.
Put yourself in his shoes. He’s drying up OpenAIs moat. There is no vision of an open future. It’s either a profit motive or an attempt to stop competitors in some way from gaining the upper hand. It’s business. If OpenAI gets their way through legal means you can expect Zuckerberg’s legal team to start filing lawsuits or bribing politicians to enact change. That’s what this game is about.
His post sets the framing that his team can use going forward to wage war against OpenAI and others. When he gets in front of congress he can point to this and say he’s fighting the good fight.
Congress will ask “well, what does open source mean in this case?” and he’s welcome to define it for them however he pleases as long as it gives them an agreeable answer, regardless of what you may think the definition is.
You are so affixed on open source because you’re allowing yourself to be nerd-sniped over a superficial detail that you’ve missed the forest for the trees. This is a titan company that has learned the mistakes of Microsoft’s monopoly hearings in the 90s, has seen and has caused the downfall of MySpace and knows the cost of not acquiring or fighting competitors.
Stop posting for a moment and think.
Big corporations are not going to bring freedom into the conversation. They aren't that interested in it. Someone has to.
I think the main point of my post still stands: People who care about openness and software freedom shouldn't buy that Llama 3.1 is 'open'. (Secondly, I argue that the same people shouldn't buy 'more open implies safer'.)
Perhaps we agree on this, and your point is simply that it was obvious to everyone already and therefore went without saying. Is that right?
The moment that letter came out everyone pounced on Zuckerberg on HN over how his company’s product isn’t quite open source. They did not put two and two together: this is a company that does release bona fide open source for software developers all the time. I’m Pretty Darn Sure (tm) Zuckerberg knows what open source means. He’s not an idiot. People don’t need to explain it to him. And he has no point in waging war against open source on AI grounds because it will not net him a victory of any kind. His company was built on open source technology. He gives away open source technology to developers in order to deter them from using his competitors’ tooling (mindshare).
Exactly no one in open source needs to be given a historic lesson on Linux. That should have been a dead giveaway. He’s using Linux and open source as an argument in favour of his company’s vision. He’s using the analogy of Linux in a way that should, ideally, give most people pause. You never saw it coming, did you? He knows what he’s doing so well that this is a master class in what business moves are all about. But no, you’re blind to it.
I understand peoples grievances: open source is the stander-by getting caught in the crossfire. An innocent victim of two clans waging war and both are using it a shield.
But as a tool of business feuds, and in particular anyone accused of monopolizing a tech space, the word “open” is powerful. “Open Source” has in the minds of anyone who has heard of it become synonymous with good, noble, selfless things. Again, mindshare. It can be used offensively or defensively if your framing of the situation is convincing. OpenAI is riding on this. And now Meta is finding their angle. Things will get political soon and this is why Zuckerberg is aligning himself to particular viewpoints.
I bring up congress only because he’s gone in front of them already, he’s surrounded himself with lawyers, he’s got competition a mile long and a mile deep, and he’s seen competitors grow and lo knows what it will take to not be surprised and cornered. AI as a technology can usurp the moat his company has built because it was “primitive” Web technology that brought him his success, and he knows it takes fighting dirty to prevent his competitors from doing to him what he did to his competitors early on. He does not want to be caught with his pants down without a strategy, but this move in particular is about thinking 2-3 steps ahead.
As an aside, it’s amusing to me because this is after all HN, the somewhat propagandist arm of a VC tech incubator/angel investor where internally this sort of business strategy is discussed regularly (not to mention Sam Altman having been president and now leading a non-open source company while claiming they’re open and singing kumbaya to the unsuspecting audiences that can’t see their business strategy in front of them). That the general audience is blind to this deserves a bucket of cold water across the face to wake people up. It’s all a ruse. Business is vicious, tech or otherwise.
— Zuckerberg says releasing a tunable model (without the training data set and the tools to train from it) "Open Source"
— It isn't
It's fascinating double-speak, because by any reasonable definition of the word source (i.e. something the model originates from), it's kept secret.
The weights aren't the source the model, they're the output of the training pipeline.
By that metric, Windows 95 was "open source" because you could customize the colors, the desktop background, and other parameters.
But sure, why not. His "Open Source AI" is just as open as "Open AI" in the end.