It's got nothing to do with Meta's social media business directly. Massive as the FB dataset is, it gets mogged by google who, what with their advanced non-PHP-based infra and superior coders, basically have way more and way better and way more accessible data... and their own AI CPUs they made, and a bigger cluster, and faster software, and more store, and so on. Big picture, Google is poised to steamroll Facebook AI-wise, and if no them, then openAI+microsoft

So Meta says "well we will buy tons of compute and try to make it distributed" "we'll make the model open and people will fine-tune with data that they found" and so on. Now google and openAI aren't competing versus meta, they are competing versus meta + all compute owned by amateurs + all data scrapped by all amateurs, which is non-trivial. so it's not so much as aspiring to be #1 as capping the knees of the competition who has superior competitiveness - but people love it because the common man wins here for once.

Anyway, eventually, they'll all be open models. Near future weaker models will run on a PC, bigger models on the cluster, weakest models on the phone... then just weak models on the phone and bigger on the PC.. eventually anything and everything fits on a phone and maybe iWatch. Even Google and openAI will have to run on the PC/phone at this point, it wouldn't make sense not to. Then since people have local access to these devices, it all gets reverse engineered, boom boom boom. now they're all open