Facebook (and all the other big tech companies) are entrenched monopolists that engage in illegal business practices to maintain their position. This is a net negative for society overall, and a huge detriment to innovation. They're able to spend that much on GPUs (and have to because Nvidia doesn't have real competition either) because of the stranglehold they have over their markets, not because they earned that in the free market through the means by which the free market is meant to work (competition, best product/service wins, etc). That money they spent is being used incredibly inefficiently because of this. With more competition, a lot more would be done with a lot less.

Facebook tossing us a pseudo-open source kinda-free LLM will make some of the nerds on this site happy though (like how decades of evil from Microsoft were erased with the release of a free text editor lol). I guess that's all that really matters at the end of the day.

Yes, taking risks with your own money can be a good thing. But taking risks also means that project don't always pan out.

I don't know enough about Facebook to say whether the expected value of that bet was positive. But that's not my judgement to make in the first place.

> The laws that govern us has improved from the medieval days where money is everything, so just because a private entity is able to spend a lot doesn't imply there's anything untoward.

Yes, I agree that it's a good thing that people and companies can spend their money how they see fit.

The problem is that it’s not society becoming wealthier, it’s the top strata getting wealthier off the increased productivity of society as a whole.