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.

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.

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.