I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck and Yann and the rest of the Meta team have adopted an open approach and are sharing the model weights, the tokenizer, information about the training data, etc. They, more than anyone else, are responsible for the explosion of open research and improvement that has happened with things like llama.cpp that now allow you to run quite decent models locally on consumer h…
The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contributions to open source and raising salaries have been through Facebook and now Meta.
It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams.
Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.