> It’s a direct degradation of investor narrative at a time when money is much tighter.
Uh, no? The investor narrative of "giving away free AI shit" has been in-effect since Pytorch dropped a half-decade ago. If you're a Meta investor disappointed by public AI development, you really must not have done your homework.
That’s not the investor narrative. The investor narrative is choking the competition out of the market and then squeeze the shit out of people. As we see right now in this season of enshittification.
That happens to not work anymore because open source sets a price floor at which people will adopt the alternative.
The investor narrative is always about building a monopoly.
Damaging the investor narrative to your most direct competitor is building in a saturated ad market is an effective indirect attack.
> The investor narrative is always about building a monopoly.
Can you point out how Meta has been applying this philosophy to AI? Given their history of open research, model weights releases and competitive alternative platforms, I struggle to envision their ideal monopoly. You claim that openness is a hostility tactic, but I think Llama wouldn't be public if it was intended to "kill" the other LLMs.
What we've gotten from Meta is more than we've gotten out of companies that should be writing society software, like Microsoft and Apple.
You are misreading my argument. I’m saying Facebook is degrading google and openai investor narrative. If Llama cost hypothetical one billion, they inflict a multiple on that on their competitors with this move while gaining massive technological advantages.
The improvements made to llama by open source community people already have propelled it past Bard by many accounts and this is a model that a few months ago was absolutely non competitive and downright bad.
Facebook has been open-sourcing AI research longer than OpenAI has even had the concept of an "investor narrative". I struggle to understand how someone could jump to the conclusion of this being a "scorched earth" maneuver with so many other reasonable explanations. Facebook has a laboratory (FAIR) with a long history of research and releases like this.
> If Llama cost hypothetical one billion, they inflict a multiple on that on their competitors with this move while gaining massive technological advantages.
If Llama cost a hypothetical one billion, then they amortized the cost over the value of the end product and the free advertisement alone.
Maybe their competitors got scooped, but GPT-3 and GPT-4 haven't gone anywhere. Not to mention, there were lots of other language models from FAANG before Llama arrived. It's not like those were made and released to spite their competitors; it was research. Google and Microsoft have lots of open Transformer research you can find.
Inflicting "damage" and gaining massive technological advantages is quite literally not their goal nor what they've done for the past half-decade. If it is, they've done a terrible job so far by collaborating with Microsoft to open their model format and provide inferencing acceleration for outdated hardware platforms.
> The improvements made to llama by open source community people already have propelled it past Bard by many accounts and this is a model that a few months ago was absolutely non competitive and downright bad.
This is something the original Llama paper acknowledged before the community "discovered" it:
> In this section, we show that briefly finetuning on instructions data rapidly leads to improvements on MMLU. Although the non-finetuned version of LLaMA-65B is already able to follow basic instructions, we observe that a very small amount of finetuning improves the performance on MMLU, and further improves the ability of the model to follow instructions.
Neither does Meta, nor Microsoft, nor Google, who have all been content to work on progressive and open AI research. Who do you perceive as their "competitors"? Each other?
Uh, no? The investor narrative of "giving away free AI shit" has been in-effect since Pytorch dropped a half-decade ago. If you're a Meta investor disappointed by public AI development, you really must not have done your homework.