> Facebook has no real way to monetize this (eg they won’t release an api a la OpenAI and they don’t own a search engine). Since they can’t monetize it… why not provide a bit of kindling to lower the barrier for everyone else to compete with your competitors. This strategy is called “commodize your complement”.Your analysis is good, but that isn't what "commoditize your complement" means.
Strictly speaking, a search engine isn't a complement for FBs revenue streams. Relatively little of FBs revenue can be attributed to search engine traffic leading to FBs walled garden where they can show the user ads.
Complements are generally a required product or service that enables your core, but that isn't revenue generating for you. Examples for FB are data centers (so they participate in the Open Compute Project[0]), and mobile operating systems (which Google already has made a commodity, for their own reasons, with Android).
What FB is doing here is commoditizing their competitors' core offering (or rather, a rather promising future one). That's just the tactic though, there are several strategies this can enable, from undermining the barriers to entry into their competitors' search markets, to actually fragmenting that market by encouraging a diversity of specialized chat interfaces over one big chat model. You can see hints of both in this announcement.
Final note: FB is also protecting itself from relying on a competitor as a supplier should chat become a preferred user interface for the content on social networks, which it hasn't, but if it ever did this would count as "commoditizing their complement", though I would actually expect FB to switch to a mostly proprietary approach in that circumstance (so not much openness on having LLMs operate on social graphs and the like), just keeping the foundation they rely on, and which undermines and prevents gatekeeping by their advertising competitors, open.
[0] https://www.opencompute.org/