The criticism seems to mostly be that Meta maintains very expensive cost structure and fat organisation in the AI. While Meta can afford to do this, if smaller orgs can produce better results it means Meta is paying a lot for nothing. Meta shareholders now need to ask the question how many non-productive people Meta is employing and is Zuck in the control of the cost.
That makes sense. I never could see the real benefit for Meta to pay a lot to produce these open source models (I know the typical arguments - attracting talent, goodwill, etc). I wonder how much is simply LeCun is interested in advancing the science and convinced Zuck this is good for company.
LeCun doesn't run their AI team - he's not in LLaMA's management chain at all. He's just especially public.
Yep - Meta's FAIR (Facebook AI Research) and GenAI (LLaMA) groups are separate, and LeCun is part of FAIR. The head of FAIR is Joelle Pineau.
It is great to see that this is the result of spending a lot in hardware while cutting costs in software development :) Well deserved.
Meta’s AI org does a heck of a lot more than produce LLM’s. R&D on ads targeting and ranking more than pays for itself.