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Comment by Discordian93 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny the bubble seems popping because the tech can be made better or cheaper instead due to loss of enthusiasm for the tech itself. AI is here to stay I suppose then.

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If anything Meta and other foundation model companies should be dropping. What's the moat? DeepSeek is releasing stuff for free.

Meta should actually go up from this. If deep seek is perfect they don't need to pay for an expensive Llama team. And even if deep seek isn't perfect, the low cost training strategies they've invented could be used by Meta to reduce the cost of Llama training.

Although Meta develops models they don't sell them. So a world where foundation models are free is fine for them.

But if they don't sell them, are they spending 50 billion a year on open source goodwill?

No, it seems to me like a stopgap measure against others, rather than anything for themselves. If they were out after "open source goodwill" they'd actually release the models as open source (like let people use it without signing a license/terms agreement, and use models for whatever). As it stands today, they're tricking people into "open source goodwill" but it will eventually catch up with them.

From Meta’s perspective, AI could be incredibly profitable in the context of generating adverts or interactive chat bots for businesses.

They just don’t want to use OpenAI/Google models because they fear being screwed over by them with anti-advert terms of service or price increases. Similar to what they suffered with Apple.

It's like everyone forgets that App Tracking Transparency (ATT) was supposed to put Meta out of business. By many accounts, Meta's ad targeting is even better now than before ATT. It's been reported that AI is what saved their ad targeting.

The OSS goodwill is just a side effect and a way to undermine companies who are not using AI to effectively make profits today.

Cheaper/more efficient is absolutely great for Meta. If they can lower their capex it would be an instant bump to their bottom line.

> By many accounts, Meta's ad targeting is even better now than before ATT.

Could you please provide any sources for this claim?

First link was soon after and they had already regained 80%+ back. The second link was much more recent and appears to be continuing to expand.

https://archive.is/8bRBH

https://medium.com/@omarkorim/is-meta-really-moving-beyond-t...

Thanks, but I don't really see how these articles support the claim that their ad network is more efficient. As you note, the first article has a single anecdata point about it actually being 10-15% worse, while the second one basically says 'trust me bro'. Also of note from the second article is the fact that the ad spend would actually increase.

Of course, if businesses are gullible enough to believe facebook when it fudges up some brand lift metrics without having a real impact on conversions, that's their choice. Trusting facebook to report any analytics is how you take your business behind the barn and help it pivot to video. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

But now (presumably) they don't need to spend 50 billion? e.g. 5 billion or whatever might be enough which makes it even easier for them to justify this.

Meta's main use of AI is in their own products, I don't think they should be affected. I would be more worried about companies that want to sell AI models and are not being efficient.

> If anything Meta

I don't follow. Meta has been the only US big dog that released open-whatever variants of their models. They did that intending to minimise the gap between them and other big dogs. Their stated goal is to give open access to the community, while at the same time develop the models for internal uses (on their many platforms).

Meta doesn't sell API access. They are not losing on "cheaper" anything. If anything, they get to implement whatever others release under open terms into their stacks. And they still have all the GPUs to further train and serve on whatever improved stack comes next.

I don't see how meta loses here. In fact I think it is one of the only big players in this space that will come out better.

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