You're wrong here. Meta has released state of the art open source ML models prior to ChatGPT. I know a few successful startups (now valued at >$1b) that were built on top of Detectron2, a best-in-class image segmentation model.
Probably not. It's written in Hack, and heavily tied to internal frameworks, so it'll be practically impossible to extract into a standalone package, unless they do a "clean room" implementation (like they did for Sapling UI https://sapling-scm.com/docs/addons/isl/).
But it has some cool features that notebook developers can take inspiration from.
Yep. Zeus is a fork of Zookeeper, Hack is a fork of PHP, etc. It's usually needed to make it work with the internal environment.
The few things that don't have forks are usually the open source projects like React or PyTorch, but even those have some custom features added to make it work with FB internals.
Google also maintains a monorepo with "forks" of all software that they use. History diverges, but is occasionally synchronized for things like security updates etc.
Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev)
The article does not make clear whether the photos are used to train recommendation systems (eg newsfeed, ads) or generative image models. The article makes it appear like the latter, but is most likely the former.
In 2018 when the article was written, Jeff was relatively unknown outside distributed research (ie MapReduce) and Google, and Sanjay probably completely unknown.
It elevates Google itself. “It’s a place where people like Jeff and Sanjay work!” Not saying that was the main motivation for producing the article and definitely not trying to question the protagonists’ achievements.
You could say that about any article that is even slightly positive about anyone that works for Google. It's an absurd premise. It prevents the telling of stories that have good outcomes.
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