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Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#241

Post by echelon »

bushido wrote: post #226

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

> albeit intentionally

The model was "accidentally" released.

Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know.

Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same.

The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution.

In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc.

The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#242

Post by altcognito »

afro88 wrote: post #206
twright wrote: post #187

This paragraph is wild. > As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court -- even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills…

I'm not a fan of Zuckerberg in the least, but one area a super intelligent lawyer would be fine at is being drowned in court filings and paperwork The bigger problem with his argument IMO is that even with open models, it's still the person or organisation with the most money / access to GPU compute winning. They run the larger model (or collection of models), they can process more tokens through them in the same amo…

Naively, you'd think the judicial systems would invoke "judgement" on the underlying purpose of dumping content in the form of filings, paperwork, etc...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#243

Post by tehlike »

axegon_ wrote: post #239
bushido wrote: post #226

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

That's simply not true. The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked, then llama.cpp was the real game changer which was built from the ground up in depressingly short amount of time. Meta had no choice but to take the L and "support" the open source community. The angry "I-hate-you-and-I-hope-you-die" kind of support.

Why do you think they continued to do it?

Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#244

Post by xdavidliu »

frenchtoast8 wrote: post #114
paxys wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is one page of text. I think you can manage to read it and come to your own conclusions without relying on clickbait headlines and out of context quotes. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/technology/meta-layoffs.h...

You clearly have an opinion you want to share, otherwise you wouldn't have written anything. Instead of just outright saying what you think, you are being vague. Why? It's true that Meta laid off a lot of people, and blamed refocusing on AI as the reason, but I still don't see how that somehow contradicts GP's quote above.

one time about 9 years ago I was in the comments of a stackoverflow question, and saying something like "an accessor function need not directly give the underlying structure of the data it's accessing, for example, just because in common lisp, (car nil) is nil and (cdr nil) is also nil, does not mean that nil is implemented as (cons nil nil).

The person I was responding to (who I recall was disagreeing with me on the more general principle) said something to the effect of "well you're wrong, in common lisp that's indeed how nil is implemented".

I was skeptical and asked for proof of this claim, and they responded clearly angrily with the link to the SBCL repo and said something like "the source code is right there. You can just look it up yourself instead of being so rude. I'm no longer going to interact with you and will delete these comments in 10 minutes."

I think I looked through the source code for a few minutes, but wasn't able to find any evidence of nil being pair of itselves.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#245

Post by nradov »

dbspin wrote: post #70
ViktorRay wrote: post #20

Comments here are surprising to me. I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either. But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think. Unless I’m missing something and am getting this who…

I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a coupl…

Spear phishing isn't a real problem. Competent organizations have already implemented sufficient defenses and controls, regardless of whether the attacker is a human or LLM. Idiots will continue getting scammed but that's nothing new. I expect that many small businesses and local governments will be essentially forced to outsource their IT infrastructure to large vendors that can maintain hardened systems appropriate to the escalating threat level.

(Nuclear waste isn't an actual problem either. For civilian powerplants the highly radioactive waste can generally be stored indefinitely at the reactor site.)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#246

Post by doublerabbit »

bushido wrote: post #226

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

> They've done enough good

Oh, please. Feel free to explain.

Facebook, Meta. 15+ years of emotional, child and human exploitation. Perverted glassware that spies on folk, lobbyists for age verification and who knows what else. They release an open model and all is fine and dandy? Nah.

Please get your priorities straight.

What do you think this Open LLM model is doing if not processing data from their murky sources?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#247

Post by canyon289 »

bushido wrote: post #226

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

Disclaimer, I work on Gemma and open models at Deepmind and the opinions here are my own

There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment.

https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases

https://github.com/google-research/bert

https://github.com/google-research/t5x

If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#248

Post by 24t »

pc86 wrote: post #219
kylecazar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle. I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

You can tell how intellectually honest someone is when someone they hate makes a good point. It's possible to dislike (or even hate) Zuckerberg and understand that he's making a good point for selfish motives, and still want that thing as well. Instead you see several comments here twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain how ackshually open models are bad now. I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because…

The model release is nice. I won't sing their praises for it because that plays into the long term strategy of a company I despise.

Is that intellectually dishonest?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#249

Post by mirekrusin »

nradov wrote: post #217
mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute? I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment. If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or o…

That's a non sequitur . While the frontier LLMs are quite useful for many tasks there's no reliable evidence that scaling them up will ever produce a true AGI. More likely some other fundamental research breakthroughs will be needed, and those breakthroughs won't necessarily come from the current leading companies. I doubt that more money would be necessary or even helpful in that.

There is no reliable evidence they won’t.

Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.

The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.

Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

#250

Post by SoftTalker »

xandrius wrote: post #228
bushido wrote: post #226

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is pure…

Enough good? You are joking, right? They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.

Competely agree. React and whatever else they've open sourced is inconsequential compared to the harm they've caused.
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