I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck and Yann and the rest of the Meta team have adopted an open approach and are sharing the model weights, the tokenizer, information about the training data, etc. They, more than anyone else, are responsible for the explosion of open research and improvement that has happened with things like llama.cpp that now allow you to run quite decent models locally on consumer hardware in a way that you can avoid any censorship or controls.
Not that I even want to make inference requests that would run afoul of the controls put in place by OpenAI and Anthropic (I mostly use it for coding stuff), but I hate the idea of this powerful technology being behind walls and having gate-keepers controlling how you can use it.
Obviously, there are plenty of people and companies out there that also believe in the open approach. But they don't have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and billions in sustainable annual cash flow and literally ten(s) of billions of dollars worth of GPUs! So it's a lot more impactful when they do it. And it basically sets the ground rules for everyone else, so that Mistral now also feels compelled to release model weights for most of their models.
Anyway, Zuck didn't have to go this way. If Facebook were run by "professional" outside managers of the HBS/McKinsey ilk, I think it's quite unlikely that they would be this open with everything, especially after investing so much capital and energy into it. But I am very grateful that they are, and think we all benefit hugely from not only their willingness to be open and share, but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." Thanks Zuck!
For sure. I just started watching the new Dwarkesh interview with Zuck that was just released ( https://t.co/f4h7ko0M7q ) and you can just tell from the first few minutes that he simply has a different level of enthusiasm and passion and level of engagement than 99% of big tech CEOs.
I mean, he was pretty open with his motivations if you ask me, open source exists because it is a positive sum game, he gets something in return for being open, if that calculus is no longer true then he has no incentive to be open.
I've never heard of this person, but many of the questions he asks Zuck show a total lack of any insight in this field. How did this interview even happen?
I actually think Dwarkesh is usually pretty good - this interview wasn’t his best (maybe he was a bit nervous because it’s Zuck?) but his show has had a lot of good conversations that get more into the weeds than other shows in my experience
Seconding this opinion: Dwarkesh's podcast is really good. I haven't watched all of the Zuck interview but I recommend others to check out a couple extra episodes to get a more representative sample. He is one of the few postcasters who does his homework.
He’s built up an impressive amount of clout over a short period of time, mostly by interviewing interesting guests on his podcast while not boring listeners to death (unlike a certain other interviewer with high-caliber guests that shall remain nameless).
Also, being open source adds phenomenal value for Meta:
1. It attracts the world's best academic talent, who deeply want their work shared. AI experts can join any company, so ones which commit to open AI have a huge advantage.
2. Having armies of SWEs contributing millions of free labor hours to test/fix/improve/expand your stuff is incredible.
3. The industry standardizes around their tech, driving down costs and dramatically improving compatibility/extensibility.
4. It creates immense goodwill with basically everyone.
5. Having open AI doesn't hurt their core business. If you're an AI company, giving away your only product isn't tenable (so far).
If Meta's 405B model surpasses GPT-4 and Claude Opus as they expect, they release it for free, and (predictably) nothing awful happens -- just incredible unlocks for regular people like Llama 2 -- it'll make much of the industry look like complete clowns. Hiding their models with some pretext about safety, the alarmist alignment rhetoric, will crumble. Like...no, you zealously guard your models because you want to make money, and that's fine. But using some holier-than-thou "it's for your own good" public gaslighting is wildly inappropriate, paternalistic, and condescending.
The 405B model will be an enormous middle finger to companies who literally won't even tell you how big their models are (because "safety", I guess). Here's a model better than all of yours, it's open for everyone to benefit from, and it didn't end the world. So go &%$# yourselves.
Yes, I completely agree with every point you made. It’s going to be so satisfying when all the AI safety people realize that their attempts to cram this protectionist/alarmist control down our throats are all for nothing, because there is an even stronger model that is totally open weights, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle!
That's specifically why OpenAI don't release weights, and why everyone who cares about safety talks about laws, and why Yud says the laws only matter if you're willing to enforce them internationally via air strikes.
> It’s going to be so satisfying
I won't be feeling Schadenfreude if a low budget group or individual takes an open weights model, does a white-box analysis to determine what it knows and to overcome any RLFH, in order to force it to work as an assistant helping walk them though the steps to make VX nerve agent.
Given how old VX is, it's fairly likely all the info is on the public internet already, but even just LLMs-as-a-better-search / knowledge synthesis from disparate sources, that makes a difference, especially for domain specific "common sense": You don't need to know what to ask for, you can ask a model to ask itself a better question first.
If some unhinged psycho want to build nerve agents and bombs I think it's laughable to believe an LLM will be the tool that makes a difference in enabling them to do so.
As you said the information is already out there - getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is.
> I think it's laughable to believe an LLM will be the tool that makes a difference
If you think it's "laughable", what do you think tools are for? Every tool makes some difference, that's why they get used.
The better models are already at the level of a (free) everything-intern, and it's very easy to use them for high-level control of robotics.
> getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is.
Knowing what question you need to ask in order to not kill oneself in the process, however, is.
Secondary school chemistry lessons taught me two distinct ways to make chlorine using only things found in a normal kitchen; but the were taught in the context "don't do X or Y, that makes chlorine", not "here's some PPE, let's get to work".
How does that work? Nobody will be able to run the big models who doesn't have a big data center or lots of rent money to burn. How is it going to matter to most of us?
It seems similar to open chip designs - irrelevant to people who are going to buy whatever chips they use anyway. Maybe I'll design a circuit board, but no deeper than that.
Modern civilization means depending on supply chains.
Maybe at 1 or 2 bits of quantization! Even the Macs with the most unified RAM are maxxed out with much smaller models than 405b (especially since it's a dense model and not a MOE).
You can build a $6,000 machine with 12 channels DDR5 memory that's big enough to hold an 8bit quantized model. The generation speed is abysmal of course.
Anything better than that starts at 200k per machine and goes up from there.
Not something you can run at home, but definitely within the budget of most medium sized firms to buy one.
You can build a machine that can run 70b models at great TpS speeds for around 30-60k. That same machine could almost certainly run a 400b model with "useable" speeds. Obviously much slower than current ChatGPT speeds but still, that kind of machine is well within the means of wealthy hobbyists/highly compensated SWEs and small firms.
I just tested llama3:70b with ollama on my old AMD ThreadRipper Pro 3965WX workstation (16-core Zen4 with 8 DDR4 mem channels), with a single RTX 4090.
Got 3.5-4 tokens/s, GPU compute was <20% busy (~90W) and the 16 CPU cores / 32 threads were about 50% busy.
>Every other big tech company has lost that kind of leadership.
He really is the last man standing from the web 2.0 days. I would have never believed I'd say this 10 years ago, but we're really fortunate for it. The launch of Quest 3 last fall was such a breath of fresh air. To see a CEO actually legitimately excited about something, standing on stage and physically showing it off was like something out of a bygone era.
Someone, somewhere on YT [1], coined the term Vanilla CEOs to describe non-tech-savvy CEOs, typically MBA graduates, who may struggle to innovate consistently. Unlike their tech-savvy counterparts, these CEOs tend to maintain the status quo rather than pursue bold visions for their companies..
But also: Facebook/Meta got burned when they missed the train on owning a mobile platform, instead having to live in their competitors' houses and being vulnerable to de-platforming on mobile. So they've invested massively in trying to make VR the next big thing to get out from that precarious position, or maybe even to get to own the next big platform after mobile (so far with little to actually show for it at a strategic level).
Anyways, what we're now seeing is this mindset reflected in a new way with LLMs - Meta would rather that the next big thing belongs to everybody, than to a competitor.
I'm really glad they've taken that approach, but I wouldn't delude myself that it's all hacker-mentality altruism, and not a fair bit of strategic cynicism at work here too.
If Zuck thought he could "own" LLMs and make them a walled garden, I'm sure he would, but the ship already sailed on developing a moat like that for anybody that's not OpenAI - now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible.
> now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible.
It's this, and by making it open and available on every cloud out there would make this accessible to other start ups who might play in Meta's competitor's spaces.
In fact Google doesn't care much if Apple controls the entire mobile phone market, Android is just guaranteed way of acquiring new users. Now they are paying yearly around $19 billion Apple to be default search engine, I expect without Android this price would be times more.
Depends on your size threshhold. For anything beyond 100 bn in market cap certainly. There is some relatively large companies with a similar flair though, like Cohere and obviously Mistral.
Well, they're not AI companies, necessarily, or at least not only AI companies, but the big hardware firms tend to have engineers at the helm. That includes Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. (Counterpoint: Apple)
Counter counter point: apples hardware division has been doing great work in the last 5 years, it’s their software that seems to have gone off the rails (in my opinion).
Purely my opinion as a long time Apple fan, but I cant help but think that Tim Cook's polices are harming the Apple brand in ways that we wont see for a few years.
Are you joking? “ v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the
Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or
derivative works thereof). “ is no sign of a strong engineering culture, it’s a sign of greed.
Nadella has such practiced corporate-speak it's impressive. I went to a two-hour talk and Q&A he did, and he didn't communicate a single piece of real information over the whole session. It was entirely HR filler language, the whole time.
If you combine engineer mindset, business acumen, relentless drive and do so over decades, you can get outsized results.
It's a thing to admire, *even if you dislike the products*. Much the same as you can be awed by Ray Kroc's execution regardless of whether you like McDonald's or what you think of him personally.
It simply isn't that common to have that combination of talents at work on one thing at such scale for so long. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had the same combo of really being down in the details despite reaching such heights.
You can contrast to Google, a company whose founders had similar traits but who got tired of it. Totally understandable, but it makes a difference in terms of the focus of google today.
Again this is true regardless of what you think of Meta on, say, privacy vs. Google's original "Don't be Evil" idea.
Saying "wow they still have engineering leadership" is hardly worship. It's a statement of fact.
Good thing that he's only 39 years old and seems more energetic than ever to run his company. Having a passionate founder is, imo, a big advantage for Meta compared to other big tech companies.
Love how everyone is romanticizing his engineering mindset. But have we already forgotten that he was even more passionate about the metaverse which, as far as I can tell, was a 50B failure?
Having an engineering mindset is not the same as never making mistakes (or never being too early to the market). The only way you won’t make those mistakes and keep a perfect record is if you never do anything major or step out of the comfort zone.
If Apple didn’t try and fail with Newton[0] (which was too early to the market for many reasons, both tech-related and not), we might’ve not had iPhone today. The engineering mindset would be to analyze how and why it happened the way it did, assess whether you can address those issues well, decide whether to proceed again or not (and how), and then execute. Obsessing over a perfect track record is the opposite of the engineering mindset imo.
His engineering mindset made him blind to the fact the metaverse was a product that nobody wanted or needed. In one of the Fridman interviews, he goes on and on about all the cool technical challenges involved in making the metaverse work. But when Fridman asked him what he likes to do in his spare time, it was all things that you could precisely not do in the metaverse. It was baffling to me that he failed to connect the dots.
VRChat is more popular, but it doesn’t mean that copying their approaches would be the move.
For all we know, VRChat as a concept of that kind is a local maximum, and imo it wont scale well to genpop. Not claiming this as an objective fact, but as a hypothesis that I personally believe to be very likely truthful. Think of it as a dead branch of evolution, where if you want to go further than that local maximum, you gotta break out of it using an entirely different approach.
I like VRChat, but thinking that a random person living in the mainstream who isnt into that type of geeky online stuff is gonna be convinced of VRChat being the ultimate metaverse experience is just foolish.
At that point, your choices are: (1) build a VRChat clone and hit that same local maximum but slightly higher at best or (2) develop something entirely different to get out of that local maximum, but risk failing (since it is a totally novel thing) and coming short of being at least as successful as VRChat. Zuck took the second option, and I respect that.
Just making a VRChat Meta Edition clone would imo give Meta much better numbers in the short-term (than their failed Meta Horizons did), but imo long-term that approach would lead them nowhere. And it seems like Meta is more interested in capturing the first-mover (into the mainstream) advantage heavy.
And honestly, I think it is better off this way. Just like if someone is making yet another group chat, i would prefer they went balls to the wall, tried to rethink things from scratch, and made a group chat app that is unlike any other ones out there. Could all of their novel approaches fail? Yes, much more likely than if they made another slack clone with a different color scheme. But the important part is, it also has a much higher chance to get the state of their niche oit of the local maximum.
Examples: Twitter could’ve been just another blog aggregator, Tesla could’ve been just another gas-powered Lotus Elise (with the original roadsters literally being just their custom internals slotted into a Lotus body), Microsoft would’ve been stuck with MS-DOS and not went into the “app as the main OS” thing (which is what they did with Windows).
Apple would’ve been relegated to a legacy of Apple II and iPod (with a dash of macbook relevancy), and rememebered as the company that made this ultra popular mp3 player before that whole niche died. Airpods (that everyone laughed at initially and lauded as an impractical pretentious purchase) are massive now, with every holdout that I personally know who finally got them recently going “i cannot believe how convenient it is, i should’ve gotten them earlier”, but it was also a similar “who needs this, they are solving a problem nobody has, everyone prefers wired with tons of better options” take[0].
If you want to get out of a perceived local maximum and break into the mainstream, you gotta try brand new approaches that would likely fail. Going “omg cannot even beat that existing competitor that’s been running for years” is kinda pointless in this case, because competing with them directly by making just a better and more successful clone of their product was never the goal. I don’t doubt even for a second that if Meta tried that, they would’ve likely accomplished it.
And for the naysayers who don’t see Meta ever breaking things out of a local maximum, just look at the Oculus Quest line. Everyone was laughing at them initially for going with the standalone device approach, but Quest has become a massive hit, with tons of people of all kinds buying it (not just people with massive gaming rigs).
0. And yes, removal of the audiojack somewhat speeded up the adoption, but I just used an adapter with zero discomfort for a year or two until i got airpods myself (and would’ve still continued using the adapter if I just didnt flatout preferred airpods in general).
Yes, I thought the same exact thing. Seemed so odd to hear him gush over his foiling and MMA while simultaneously expecting everyone else to migrate to the metaverse.
I mean, I am not sure what response people expected when a person, in a conversation about their work project, is being asked “what do you like to do in your free time.”
Maybe I am an outlier, but when in a conversation about work-related things someone asks “what do you like to do in your free time”, I believe the implication here is that there is a silent “…to do in your free time [outside of work]”.
Answering that question with more stuff related to work project typically falls somewhere on the spectrum between pandering to the audience and cringe.
No idea how this concept can even count as novel on HN, where a major chunk of users that are software devs keep talking about hobbies like woodworking/camping/etc. (aka hobbies that are typically as far removed from the digital realm as possible).
Imo Zuck talking about MMA being his personal free time hobby is about as odd as a software dev talking about being into woodworking. In other words, not at all.
This is a super common behavior when a) the product is for other people, but b) you don't care about those other people. You'll see both in technologists (who, as you say, get fascinated by the technology or the idea) and in MBAs (who instead get hypnotized by fashionable trends, empire building, and the potential for large piles of money).
The computer game and television/movie industries both dwarf adult entertainment. The reasons for the rationale on how pornography made the VCR and VHS in particular a success (bringing affordable video pornography into the privacy of your home) do not apply to VR.
and is responsible for building evil products to fund this stuff.
Apple photos and FaceTime are good products for sharing information without ruining your attention span or bring evil. Facebook could’ve been like that.
If you actually listen to how Zuck defines the metaverse, it's not Horizons or even a VR headset. That's what pundits say, most of whom love pointing out big failures more than they like thinking deeply.
He sees the metaverse as the entire shared online space that evolves into a more multi-user collaborative model with more human-centric input/output devices than a computer and phone. It includes co-presence, mixed reality, social sites like Instagram and Facebook as well as online gaming, real-world augments, multiuser communities like Roblox, and "world apps" like VRChat or Horizons.
Access methods may be via a VR headset, or smart glasses, or just sensors that alert you to nearby augmented sites that you can then access on your phone - think Pokemon Go with gyms located at historical real-world sites.
That's what $50B has been spent on, and it's definitely a work in progress. But it sure doesn't seem dead based on the fact that more Quest headsets have been sold than this gen's Xboxes; Apple released Vision Pro; Rayban Smart Glasses are selling pretty well; new devices are planned from Google, Valve, and others; and remote work is an unkillable force.
The online and "real" worlds are only getting more connected, and it seems like a smart bet to try to drive what the next generation looks like. I wouldn't say the $50B was spent efficiently, but I understand that forging a new path means making lots of missteps. You still get somewhere new though, and if it's a worthwhile destination then many people will be following right behind you.
It’s really obvious the actual “metaverse” goal wasn’t a vrchat/second life style product. It was another layer on top of the real world where physical space could be monetized, augmented and eventually advertised upon.
AR glasses in a spectacles form factor was the goal, it’s just to get there a VR headset includes solving a lot of the problems you need to solve for the glasses to work at all.
It's a bit too early IMHO to declare the metaverse a failure.
But that said, I don't think it matters. I don't know anybody who hasn't been wrong about something, or made a bad bet at times. Even if he is wrong about everything else (which he's not, because plenty of important open source has come out of facebook), that doesn't change the extreme importance that is Llama and Meta's willingness to open things up. It's a wonderful gift they have given to humanity that has only barely started.
The Quest is the top selling VR headset by a very large margin.
He's well positioned to take that market when it eventually matures a bit. Once the tech gets there, say in a decade we might see most people primarily consume content via VR and phones. That's movies, games, TV, sporting events, concerts.
Nor could I. And I can't imagine sitting next to my wife watching a football game together on my phone. But I could while waiting in line by myself.
Similarly, I could imagine sitting next to my daughter, who is 2,500 miles away at college, watching the name together on a virtual screen we both share. And then playing mini-golf or table tennis together.
Different tools are appropriate for different use cases. Don't dismiss a hammer because it's not good at driving screws.
Asking for an impossible hypothetical and then claiming something equally impossible. stay classy hackernews.
Chances are that you would take the 8 million and run.
Having a nerdy vision of the future and spending tens of billions of dollars to try and make it a reality while shareholders and bean counters crucify you for it is the most engineer thing imaginable. What other CEO out there is taking such risks?
Tablet PC (first iteration was in the early 90s!), Pocket PC, WebTV and Media Center PC (Microsoft first tried Smart TVs in the late 90s! There wasn't any content to watch and most people didn't have broadband, oops), Xbox, and the numerous PC standards they pushed for (e.g. mandating integrated audio on new PCs), smart watches (SPOT watch, look it up!), and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
You'll notice in most of those categories, they moved too soon and others who came later won the market.
Think of it as a 50B spending spree where he gave that to VR tech out of enthusiasm. Even I, with the cold dark heart that I have, has to admit he's a geek hero with his open source attitude.
That's the point. He does things because he is excited about something, not to please shareholders. Shareholders didn't liked Metaverse at all. And shareholders likely don't like spending billion dollar in GPUs just to give the benefit away for free to others.
Zuck's job is to have vision and take risks. He's doing that. He's going to encounter failures and I doubt he's still looking in the rearview mirror about it. And overall, Zuck has a tremendous amount of net success, to say the least.
It isn't necessarily a failure "yet". Don't think anybody is saying VR/AR isn't a huge future product, just that current tech is not quite there. We'll see if Apple can do better, they both made tradeoffs.
It is still possible that VR and Generative AI can join in some synergy.
I get so annoyed by this every time I see it. It’s not because AI took over the news cycle that the idea of a Metaverse is a failure.
If you could have predicted that Internet was going to change our lives and that most people would spend most of their waking hours living their lives on the Internet people probably would have told you that you were a fool in the early days.
The same is true with this prediction of VR. If you think in the next decade that VR is not going to be the home for more and more people then you are wrong.
That's almost the point isn't it? He still believes in it, just the media moved on. Passion means having a vision that isn't deterred by immediate short term challenges because you can "see over the mountain".
Will metaverse be a failure? Maybe. But Apple doesn't think so to the tune of $100B invested so far, which is pretty good validation there is some value there.
Unsuccessful ideas can live on for a long time in a large corporation.
Nobody wants to tell the boss his pet project sucks - or to get their buddies laid off. And with Facebook's $100 billion in revenue, nobody's going to notice the cost of a few thousand engineers.
I swear, this feels like people get paid to write positive stuff about him? Have you forgotten his shitty leadership and practices around data and lock-ins?
Yes how dare different people have different opinions about different people? It's almost as if we all should be a monolithic voice that agrees with you.
The thread was suspiciously positive, like almost exclusive. Your comment adds nothing to the discussion, you're just snarky and nothing else. So get off my back
>>I swear, this feels like people get paid to write positive stuff about him?
----
>you're just snarky and nothing else
Please re-read your own comment. See above.
>So get off my back
Absolutely not. You said something that was decidedly ignorant(how dare people praise x good thing done by omg horrible y people!), and I called you out on it. I expect better discussion and people skills from someone who holds position of a CTO rather than just "haha you're all paid shills!"
Let's be honest that he's probably not doing it due to goodness of his heart. He's most likely trying to commoditize the models so he can sell their complement. It's a strategy Joel Spolsky had talked about in the past (for those of you who remember who that is). I'm not sure what the complement of AI models is that Meta can sell exactly, so maybe it's not a good strategy but I'm certain it's a strategy of some sort
You lead with a command to be honest and then immediately speculate on private unknowable motivations and then attribute, without evidence, his decision to a strategy you can't describe.
What is this? Someone said something nice, and you need to "restore balance"
They said something naive, not just "nice". It's good to correct the naivete.
For example, as we speak, Zuck is lobbying congress to ban Tiktok. Putting aside whether you think it should be banned, this is clearly a cynical strategy with pure self interest in mind. He's trying to monopolize.
Whatever Zuck's strategy with open source is, it's just a strategy. Much like AMD is pursuing that strategy. They're corporations and they don't care about you or me.
Also keep in mind that it's still a proprietary model. Meta gets all the benefits of open source contributions and testing while retaining exclusive business use.
EDIT: Looks like they did open up commercial use with version 2 with the explicit restriction to prevent any major competitor to Meta from using Llama, and that any improvements related to Llama can only apply to Llama. So an attempt to expand the scope of usage and adoption of their proprietary model without their main competitors being able to use it, which still fits my original point.
how can anyone doubt Ballmer's passion after his sweaty stage march. He ain't in charge anymore anyway. Gates was more methodical evil than passionate and his big moves were all just stabbing someone else to take their place.
Meta also spearheaded the open compute project. I originally joined Google because of their commitment to open source and was extremely disappointed when I didn't see that culture continue as we worked on exascale solutions. Glad to see Meta carrying the torch here. Hope it continues.
I joined in 2014, and even I saw the changes in just a few years when I was there.
Still I was a bit baffled reading all the lamenters: I joined late enough that I had no illusions and always saw Google as doing pretty well for an 'enterprise', instead of feeling and expressing constant disappointment that the glory days were over.
One of the many perks of releasing open-ish models, React, and many other widely used tools over the years. Meta might be the big tech whose open source projects are most widely used. That gives you some dev goodwill, even though your main products profit from some pretty bad stuff.
The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contributions to open source and raising salaries have been through Facebook and now Meta.
It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams.
Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
> It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing.
That argument could apply to anyone who pays anyone well.
Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.
(And by 'treat well', I mean the whole package. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.)
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
Huh, how is that 'dilution' supposed to work?
Well, and at least those 'evil' money grubbers are out of someone else's hair. They don't just get created from thin air. So if those rimarly-compensation-motivated people are now writing software, then at least investment banking and management consulting are free again for the primarily-craft-motivated people to enjoy!
They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate.
Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts.
Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts.
Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families.
Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that. Like our peers in other engineering disciplines, it's practically our baseline state. What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, which is a different thing and gets developed in a different and more stable market environment.
Meta has products that are used by billions of people every week and has been extremely profitable for over 15 years, with no sign of obvious downward trend. I don't see how it can be described as a bubble.
> They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate.
Huh, if I get paid lots as a worker, I don't care whether the company goes belly up later. Why should I? (I include equity in the total pay package under judgement here, and by 'lots' I mean that the sum of equity and cash is big. If the cash portion is large enough, I don't care if the stock goes to zero. In any case, I sell any company stock as soon as I can, and invest the money in diversified index funds.)
> Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts.
I'm more than ok with willing investors (potentially) losing capital they put at risk. Just don't put some captive public retirement fund or task payer money into this. Those investors are grown up and rich, they don't need us to know better what is good for them.
> Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts.
This says more about carefully managing the maximum amount of leverage you want to take on in your life. It's hardy an argument that would convince me that lower pay is better for me.
People freak out when thinking about putting leverage in their stock portfolio, but they take on a mortgage on a house without thinking twice. Even though getting out of a well diversified stock portfolio and remove all the leverage takes less than half an hour these days (thanks to online brokers), but selling your single concentrated illiquid house can take months and multiple percentage points of transaction costs (agents, taxes, etc).
Just don't buy a house, or at least buy within your means. And make sure you are thinking ahead of time how to get out of that investment, in case things turn sour.
> Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families.
Guess who's in a good negotiation position to demand respect and freedom and stability from their (prospective) employer? Someone who has other lucrative offers. Money is one part of compensation, freedom and respect (and even fun!) are others.
Your alternative offers don't all have to offer these parts of the package in the same proportions. You can use a rich offer with lots of money from place A, to try and get more freedom (at a lower pay) from place B.
Though I find that in practice that the places that are valuing me enough to pay me a lot, also tend to value me enough to give me more respect and freedom. (It's far from a perfect correlation, of course.)
> Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that.
Yes, have lived on a pittance before, and survived. I don't strictly 'need' the money. But I still firmly believe that all else being equal that 'more money = more better'.
> What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, [...].
I'd rather take the money, thank you.
If you want to fight, please go ahead, but don't speak for me.
And the whole thing smells a lot like you'd (probably?) want to introduce some kind of mandatory licensing and certificates, like they have in other engineering disciplines. No thank you. Programming is one of the few well paid white collar jobs left where you don't need a degree to enter. Let's keep it that way.
> Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.
There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".
It's the same as "lowering prices to the benefit of consumer" vs "price dumping to become a monopoly".
Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.
> Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.
Please provide some examples.
> There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".
It's up to the workers themselves to decide whether that's a good deal.
And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.
I can also take that offer and shop it around. Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.
> Where has that ever worked? Predatory pricing is highly unlikely.
> See eg
Neither of the articles understand how predatory pricing works, assuming it's a single-market process. In the most usual case you fuel price dumping in one market by profits from the other. This way you can run it potentially indefinitely and you're doing it not in a hope of making profits on this market some day but to make sure no one else does. Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works. Netscape died despite having a superior product because it was competing with a public school so to speak. Browser market is dead up to this date.
> And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.
That's exactly what happens and people proceed to degrade professionally.
> Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.
Not unless that someone sits on the ads money pipe.
> Please provide some examples
What kind of example do you expect? If it helps, half the people I personally know in Google "practice the trumpet" in your words. Situation is slowly improving though in the past two years.
I'm not saying it should be made illegal. I'm saying it's definitely happening and it's sad for me to see. I want the tech industry to move forward, not the amateur trumpet one.
> For a period of time, the prices are set unrealistically low to ensure competitors are unable to effectively compete with the dominant firm without making substantial loss. The aim is to force existing or potential competitors within the industry to abandon the market so that the dominant firm may establish a stronger market position and create further barriers to entry.[2] Once competition has been driven from the market, consumers are forced into a monopolistic market where the dominant firm can safely increase prices to recoup its losses.[3]
What you are describing is not predatory pricing, that's a big part of why I was confused.
> Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works.
Please consider reading the article more carefully. Your interpretation requires the author to be an idiot.
---
What you are describing about browsers is interesting. But it's more like bundling and cross subsidies. Neither Microsoft nor Google were ever considering making money from raising the price of their browser after competition had been driven out. That's required for predatory pricing.
> Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.
Veterinaries (including technicians) have an absurdly high rate of suicide. They have a stressful job, constantly around death and mistreatment situations, and don’t get the respect (despite often knowing more than human doctors) or the salaries to match.
Calling these jobs “cute” or saying the veterinary situation is “fortunate” borders on cruel, but I believe you were just uninformed.
> Yet, people still line up to become veterinaries (and technicians). Which proves my point.
The informed reality is that the rate of drop out is also huge. Not only from people who leave the course while studying, but also professionals who abandon the field entirely after just a few years of work.
Many of them are already suffering in college yet continue due to a sense of necessity or sunk cost and burn themselves out.
So no, it does not prove your point. The one thing it proves is that the public in general is insufficiently informed about what being a veterinary is like. They should be paid more and have better conditions (worth noting some countries do treat them better), not be churned out and left to die (literally) because there’s always another chump down the line.
> So no, it does not prove your point. The one thing it proves is that the public in general is insufficiently informed about what being a veterinary is like.
That doesn't really matter. What would matter is how well informed the people who decide to become a veterinary are.
> They should be paid more and have better conditions [...]
Well, everyone should be treated better and paid better.
> [...] because there’s always another chump down the line.
If they could somehow make the improvements you suggest (but don't specify how), they would lead to even more chumps joining the queue.
(And no, that's not a generalised argument against making people's lives better. If you improve the appeal of non-vet jobs, fewer people will join the vet line.
If you improve the treatment of workers in general, the length of the wanna-be-vet queue, and any other 'job queue' will probably stay roughly the same. But people will be better off.)
I am fine with large pool of greedy people trying their hand at programming. Some of them will stick and find meaning in work. Rest will wade out in downturn. Net positive.
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
It's great to enjoy programming, and to enjoy your job. But we live under capitalism. We can't fault people for just working a job.
Pushing salary lowers help the society at large, or at least that’s the thesis of OP. While it sucks for SWE, I actually kind of agree. The skyrocketing of SWE salary in the US, and the slow progress US is making towards normalizing/reducing it does not help US competitiveness. I would not fault Meta for this though, as much as US society at large.
SWE should enjoy it while they can before salary becomes similar to other engineering trades.
I don't understand people who think high salaries are bad. Who should get the money instead? Should even more of it go to execs and shareholders? Why is that better?
> but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing.
I'm not convinced he's actually done that. Pretty much any 'profitable, sustainable business' can afford software developers.
Software developers are paid pretty decently, but (grabbing a couple of lists off of Google) it looks like there's 18 careers more lucrative than it (from a wage perspective), and computers-in-general are only 3 of the top 25 highest paying careers - https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay...
Medical, Legal, Finance, and Sales as careers (roughly in that order) all seem to pay more on average.
Few viable technology businesses and non-technology busiesses with internal software departments were prepared to see their software engineers suddenly suddenly expect doctor or lawyer pay and can't effectively accomodate the change.
They were largely left to rely on loyalty and other kinds of fragile non-monetary factors to preserve their existing talent and institutuonal knowledge and otherwise scavenge for scraps when making new hires.
For those companies outside the specific Silicon Valley money circle, it was an extremely disruptive change and recovery basically requires that salaries normalize to some significant degree. In most cases, engineers provide quite a lot of value but not nearly so much value as FAANG and SV speculators could build into their market-shaping offers.
It's not a healthy situation for the industry or (if you're wary of centralization/monopolization) society as a whole.
In general, it's probably not sustainable (with some exceptions like academia that have never paid that well leaving aside the top echelon and that had its own benefits) to expect that engineering generally lags behind SV software engineering. Especially with some level of remote persisting, presumably salaries/benefits equilibrate to at least some degree.
Because maintaining the organizational infrastructure to coordinate remote teams dispersed to time zones all over the world and with different communication styles, cultural assumptions, and legal requirements is a whole matter of its own?
Companies that can do that are at an advantage over those who can't right now, but pulling that off is neither trivial nor immediate nor free.
I worked for a company that was very good at that. It resulted in software organizations in 50+ countries.
I had teams in North American, Europe, Russia and East Asia. It resulted in a diversified set of engineers who were close to our customers (except in Russia where the engineers were highly qualified but few prospects for sales). Managing across cultures and time zones is a competence. Jet lag from travel was not as great...
A person (or a company) can be two very different things at the same time. It's undeniable as you say that there have been a lot of high-profile open source innovations coming from Facebook (ReactJS, LLaMA, HHVM, ...), but the price that society at large paid for all of this is not insignificant either, and Meta hasn't meaningfully apologized for the worst of it.
Meta’s open source contributions stand on their own as great regardless of their obviously shady social media management and privacy tactics. The former are feats of software engineering, the later have a lot to do with things far beyond problems like handing data at scale, refreshing feeds fast, ensuring atomic updates to user profiles, etc.
Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.
Yeah. Very glad Meta is doing what they’re doing here, but the tiger’s not magically changing its stripes. Take care as it might next decide to eat your face.
They're commoditizing their complement [0][1], inasmuch as LLMs are a complement of social media and advertising (which I think they are).
They've made it harder for competitors like Google or TikTok to compete with Meta on the basis of "we have a super secret proprietary AI that no one else has that's leagues better than anything else". If everyone has access to a high quality AI (perhaps not the world's best, but competitive), then no one -- including their competitors -- has a competitive advantage from having exclusive access to high quality AI.
And the content industry will grow ever more addictive and profitable, with content curated and customized specifically for your psyche. The very industry Meta happens to be the one to benefit from its growth most among all tech giants.
> will make most humans' (economic) value evaporate for the same reason
With one hand it takes, with the other it gives - AI will be in everyone's pocket, and super-human level capable of serving our needs; the thing is, you can't copy a billion dollars, but you can copy a LLaMA.
> OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.
No current LLM is that, and Transformers may always be too sample-expensive for that.
But if anyone does make such a thing, OpenAI won't mind… so long as the AI is "safe" (whatever that means).
OpenAI has been totally consistent with saying that safety includes assuming weights are harmful until proven safe because you cannot un-release a harmful model; Other researchers say the opposite, on the grounds that white-box research is safety research is easier and more consistent.
I lean towards the former, not because I fear LLMs specifically, but because the irreversibly and the fact we don't know how close or far we are means it's a habit we should turn into a norm before it's urgent.
He went into the details of how he thinks about open sourcing weights for Llama responding to a question from an analyst in one of the earnings call last year after Llama release. I had made a post on Reddit with some details.
Some noteworthy quotes that signal the thought process at Meta FAIR and more broadly
* We’re just playing a different game on the infrastructure than companies like Google or Microsoft or Amazon
* We would aspire to and hope to make even more open than that. So, we’ll need to figure out a way to do that.
* ...lead us to do more work in terms of open sourcing, some of the lower level models and tools
* Open sourcing low level tools make the way we run all this infrastructure more efficient over time.
* On PyTorch: It’s generally been very valuable for us to provide that because now all of the best developers across the industry are using tools that we’re also using internally.
* I would expect us to be pushing and helping to build out an open ecosystem.
A lot of the other companies are selling AI as a service. Meta hasn't really been in the space of selling a raw service in that way. However, they are at a center point of human interaction that few can match. In this space, it is how they can leverage those models to enhance that and make that experience better that can be where they win. (Think of, for example, giving a summery of what you've missed in your groups, letting you join more and still know what's happening without needing to shift through it all, identifying events and activities happening that you'd be interested in. This will make it easier to join more groups as the cost of being in one is less, driving more engagement).
For facebook, it isn't the technology, but how it is applied, is where their game starts to get interesting.
When you give away the tooling and treat it as first class, you'll get the wider community improving it on top of your own efforts, cycle that back into the application of it internally and you now have a positive feedback loop where other, less open models, lack one.
Weaken the competition (google and ms). Bing doesn’t exist because it’s a big money maker for ms, it exists to put a dent in google’s power. Android vs apple. If you can’t win then you try to make the others lose.
I think you really have to understand Zuckerberg's "origin story" to understand why he is doing this. He created a thing called Facebook that was wildly successful. Built it with his own two hands. We all know this.
But what is less understood is that from his point of view, Facebook went through a near death experience when mobile happened. Apple and Google nearly "stole" it from him by putting strict controls around the next platform that happened, mobile. He lives every day even still knowing Apple or Google could simply turn off his apps and the whole dream would come to an end.
So what do you do in that situation? You swear - never again. When the next revolution happens, I'm going to be there, owning it from the ground up myself. But more than that, he wants to fundamentally shift the world back to the premise that made him successful in the first place - open platforms. He thinks that when everyone is competing on a level playing field he'll win. He thinks he is at least as smart and as good as everyone else. The biggest threat to him is not that someone else is better, it's that the playing field is made arbitrarily uneven.
Of course, this is all either conjecture or pieced together from scraps of observations over time. But it is very consistent over many decisions and interactions he has made over many years and many different domains.
We don't really know where AI will be useful in a business sense yet (the apps with users are losing money) but a good bet is that incumbent platforms stand to benefit the most once these uses are discovered. What Meta is doing is making it easier for other orgs to find those use-cases (and take on the risk) whilst keeping the ability to jump in and capitalize on it when it materializes.
As for X-Risk? I don't think any of the big tech leadsership actually beleive in that. I also think that deep down a lot of the AI safety crowd love solving hard problems and collecting stock options.
On cost, the AI hype raises Met's valuation by more than the cost of engineers and server farms.
> I don't think any of the big tech leadsership actually beleive in that.
I think Altman actually believes that, but I'm not sure about any of the others.
Musk seems to flitter between extremes, "summoning the demon" isn't really compatible with suing OpenAI for failing to publish Lemegeton Clavicula Samaltmanis*.
> I also think that deep down a lot of the AI safety crowd love solving hard problems and stock options.
Probably at least one of these for any given person.
But that's why capitalism was ever a thing: money does motivate people.
Zuck equated the current point in AI to iOS vs Android and MacOS vs Windows. He thinks there will be an open ecosystem and a closed one coexisting if I got that correctly, and thinks he can make the former.
Meta is an advertising company that is primarily driven by user generated content. If they can empower more people to create more content more quickly, they make more money. Particularly the metaverse, if they ever get there, because making content for 3d VR is very resource intensive.
Making AI as open as possible so more people can use it accelerates the rate of content creation
Mark probably figured Meta would gain knowledge and experience more rapidly if they threw Llama out in the wild while they caught up to the performance of the bigger & better closed source models. It helps that unlike their competition, these models aren't a threat to Meta's revenue streams and they don't have an existing enterprise software business that would seek to immediately monetize this work.
If they start selling ai in their platform, it's a really good option, as people know they can run it somewhere else if they had to (for any reason, e.g: you could make a poc with their platform but then because of regulations you need to self host, can you do that with other offers?)
Besides everything said here in comments, Zuck would be actively looking to own the next platform (after desktop/laptop and mobile), and everyone's trying to figure what that would be.
He knows well that if competitors have a cash cow, they have $$ to throw at hundreds of things. By releasing open-source, he is winning credibility, establishing Meta as the most used LLM, and finally weakening the competition from throwing money on the future initiatives.
They heavily use AI internally for their core FaceBook business - analyzing and policing user content, and this is also great PR to rehabilitate their damaged image.
There is also an arms race now of AI vs AI in terms of generating and detecting AI content (incl deepfakes, election interference, etc, etc). In order not to deter advertizers and users, FaceBook need to keep up.
They will be able to integrate intelligence into all their product offerings without having to share the data with any outside organization. Tools that can help you create posts for social media (like an AI social media manager), or something that can help you create your listing to sell an item on Facebook Marketplace, tools that can help edit or translate your messages on Messenger/Whatsapp, etc. Also, it can allow them to create whole new product categories. There's a lot you can do with multimodal intelligent agents! Even if they share the models themselves, they will have insights into how to best use and serve those models efficiently and at scale. And it makes AI researchers more excited to work at Meta because then they can get credit for their discoveries instead of hoarding them in secret for the company.
The same thing he did with VR. Probably got tipped off Apple is on top of Vision Pro, and so just ruthlessly started competing in that market ahead of time
/tinfoil
Releasing Llama puts a bottleneck on developers becoming reliant on OpenAI/google/microsoft.
Generative AI is a necessity for the metaverse to take off. Creating metaverse content is too time consuming otherwise. Mark really wants to control a platform so the companies whole strategy seems to be around getting the quest to take off.
I would assume it's related to fair use and how OpenAI and Google have closed models that are built on copyrighted material. Easier to make the case that it's for the public good if it's open and free than not...
It does seem uncharacteristic. Wonder how much of the hate Zuck gets is people that just don't like Facebook, but as person/engineer, his heart is in the right place? It is hard to accept this at face value and not think there is some giant corporate hidden agenda.
> but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks."
AI safety risk is substantial. It is also testable. (There are prediction markets on it, for example.) Of course, some companies may latch onto various valid arguments for insincere reasons.
I'd challenge everyone to closely compare ideas such as "open source software is better" versus "state of the art trained AI models are better developed in the open". The exact same arguments do NOT work for both.
It is one thing to publish papers about e.g. transformers. It is another thing to publish the weights of something like GPT 3.5+; it might theoretically be a matter of degree, but that matter of degree makes a real difference, if only in terms of time. Time matters because it gives people and society some time to respond.
Software security reports are often made privately or embargoed. Why? We want to give people and companies time to defend their systems.
Now consider this thought-experiment: assume LLMs (and their hybrid derivatives) enable perhaps 1,000,000 new kinds of cyberattacks, 1,000 new bioweapon attacks, and so on. Are there are a correspondingly large number of defensive benefits? This is the crux of the question I think. First, I don't expect we're going to get a good assessment of the overall "balance". Second, any claims of "balance" are beside the point, because these attacks and defenses don't simply cancel each other out. The distribution of the AI-fueled capability advance will probably ratchet up risk and instability.
Open source software's benefits stem from the assumption that bugs get shallower with more eyes. More eyes means that the open source product gets stronger defensively.
With LLMs that publish their weights, both the research and the implementations is out; you can't get guardrails. The closest analogue to an "OSS security report" would take the form of "I just got your LLM to design a novel biological weapon. Do you think you can use it to design an antidote?"
A systematic risk-averse person might want to ask: what happens if we enumerate all offensive vs defensive technological shifts? Should we reasonably believe that the benefits outweigh the risks?
Unfortunately, the companies making these decisions aren't bearing the risks. This huge externality both pisses me off and scares the shit out of me.
You did not respond to the crux of my argument: The dynamics between offensive and defensive technology. Have you thought about it? What do you think is rational to conclude?
This is the organization that wouldn't moderate facebook during Myanmarr yeah? The one with all the mental health research they ignore?
Zuckerberg states during the interview that once the ai reaches a certain level of capability they will stop releasing weights - i.e. they are going the "OpenAI" route: this is just trying to get ahead of the competition, it's a sound strategy when you're behind to leverage open source.
I see no reason to be optimistic about this organization, the open source community should use this an abandon them ASAP.
It's crazy how the managerial executive class seems to resent the vital essence of their own companies. Based on the behavior, nature, stated beliefs and interviews I've seen of most tech CEOs and CEOs in general, there seems to be almost a natural aversion to talking about things in non hyper-abstracted terms.
I get the feeling that the nature of the corporate world is often better understood as a series of rituals to create the illusion of the necessity of the capitalist hierarchy itself. (not that this is exclusive to capitalism, this exists in politics and any system that becomes somewhat self-sustaining) More important than a company doing well is the capacity to use the company as an image/lifestyle enhancement tool for those at the top. So many companies run almost mindlessly as somewhat autonomous machines, allowing pretense and personal egoic myth-making to win over the purpose of the company in the first place.
I think this is why Elon, Mark, Jensen, etc. have done so well. They don't perceive their position as founder/CEOs as a class position: a level above the normal lot that requires a lack of caring for tangible matters. They see their companies as ways of making things happen, for better or for worse.
It's because Elon, Mark, and Jensen are true founders. They aren't MBAs who got voted in because shareholders thought they would make them the most money in the shortest amount of time.
The more likely version is that this course of action is in line with strategy recommended by consultants. Takes the wind out of their competitors sail
Yes - for sure this AI is trained on their vast information base from their social networks and beyond but at least it feels like they're giving back something. I know it's not pure altruism and Zuck has been open about exactly why they do it (tldr - more advantages in advancing AI through the community that ultimately benefits Meta), but they could have opted for completely different paths here.
The quickest way to disabuse yourself of this notion is to login to Facebook. You’ll remember that Zuck makes money from the scummiest pool of trash and misinformation the world has ever seen. He’s basically the Web 2.0 tabloid newspaper king.
I don’t really care how much the AI team open sources, the world would be a better place if the entire company ceased to exist.
Not that I even want to make inference requests that would run afoul of the controls put in place by OpenAI and Anthropic (I mostly use it for coding stuff), but I hate the idea of this powerful technology being behind walls and having gate-keepers controlling how you can use it.
Obviously, there are plenty of people and companies out there that also believe in the open approach. But they don't have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and billions in sustainable annual cash flow and literally ten(s) of billions of dollars worth of GPUs! So it's a lot more impactful when they do it. And it basically sets the ground rules for everyone else, so that Mistral now also feels compelled to release model weights for most of their models.
Anyway, Zuck didn't have to go this way. If Facebook were run by "professional" outside managers of the HBS/McKinsey ilk, I think it's quite unlikely that they would be this open with everything, especially after investing so much capital and energy into it. But I am very grateful that they are, and think we all benefit hugely from not only their willingness to be open and share, but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." Thanks Zuck!