Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahel | Hacker News Reader

Why Meta decided to open source their Llama architecture and complete models? From a strategic business perspective, I'm trying to puzzle why they would give that up, a competitive advantage (even though it might not be as good as OpenAI product), rather than directly competing with OpenAI. What's the reasoning behind this decision?

View on HN

Meta's is doing classical (and brilliant) "commodify your complements".

LLMs and AI is not where Meta adds value to the market. They add value via advertising. Therefore, AI is not Meta's product, and thus Meta should aim to make AI as cheap as possible.

They did the same thing for infra. Meta doesn't sell cloud computing, so they want to make infra as cheap as possible.

I'd imagine that Meta is trying to avoid an AI / LLM monopoly from happening as the primary goal. They suffered when Apple was a gateway to their service for ios users and decided to shut their access to user data off. And AI is clearly going to be used widely to aid in content generation if not doing entirely. Also they tried jumping on the chatbot hype with M or something. That didn't pan out as well. By opening up AI, they would enable tools that allow users to pump out more content easily and spend more time in app. Getting the goodwill of dev community is a bonus. A brilliant move from Meta.

meta is large enough (and diversified enough), when OpenAI valuation goes to pennies (because LLM won't solve any real problem, nor they'll remain relevant in the long term and open source alternative are more than enough for most chatbot usecases), they can acquire all the relevant technologies from OpenAI, Anthropic and such. The real question is why google didn't release their models.

> because LLM won't solve any real problem,

LLMs in their current form are very useful tools for many people. Most programmers I know use them daily. I have even friends who aren't tech savvy who paid the subscription to ChatGPT and use it all the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com