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Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

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Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#441

Post by bravesoul2 »

burroisolator wrote: post #212
jrm4 wrote: post #76

Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.

AI only got big, especially for coding, because they were able to train on a massive corpus of open source code. I don't think it is a coincidence.

Open source may be necessary but it is not sufficient. You also needed the compute power and architecture discoveries and the realisation that lots of data > clever feature mapping for this kind of work.

A world without open source may have given birth to 2020s AI but probably at a slower pace.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#442

Post by nashashmi »

ninininino wrote: post #61
nashashmi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have majority of the attention and market cap. They have runway. And that part is the most important thing. Others don’t have the users to grand test developments.

I'm not so sure they have runway. XAI has Elon's fortune to burn, and Spacex to fund it. Gemini has the ad and search business of Google to fund it. Meta has the ad revenue of IG+FB+WhatsApp+Messenger. Whereas OpenAI $10 billion in annual revenue, but low switching costs for both consumers and developers using their APIs. If you stay at the forefront of frontier models, you need to keep burning money like crazy, that…

Ok, others have more runway, and less research talent.

OpenAI has enough runway to figure things out and place themselves in a healthier position.

And come to think of it, loosing a few researchers to other companies may not be so bad. Like you said that others have cash to burn. They might spend that cash more liberally and experiment with bolder riskier products and either fail spectacularly or succeed exponentially. And OpenAI can still learn from it well enough and still benefit even though it was never their cash.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#443

Post by dgb23 »

sofixa wrote: post #365
bookv wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Also the only way multiculturalism can work is through a totalitarian state which is why surveillance and censorship is so big in the UK. That seems like a wild claim to make without any supporting evidence. Even Switzerland can be used to disprove it, so I'm not sure where you're coming from that assuredly. The UK isn't totalitarian in the same sense that even Singapore is, let alone actually totalitarian states l…

For reference:

Switzerland has one of the highest percentage of foreigners in Europe, four official languages, a decentralized political system, very frequent direct democratic votes and consensus governance (no mayors, governors and prime ministers, just councils all the way down).

Switzerland set up in such a way that it absorbs and integrates many different cultures into a decentralized, democratic system. One of the primary historical causes for this is our belligerent past. I'd like to think that this was our only way out of constantly hitting each other over our heads.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#444

Post by saubeidl »

jrm4 wrote: post #76

Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.

What's even crazier is that China are the good guys when it comes to open source AI.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#445

Post by revskill »

epolanski wrote: post #419
Festro wrote: post #409

What an odd turn of phrase. Historically speaking, mercenaries have absolutely slaughtered missionaries in every confrontation. If missionaries could be mercenaries, they would.

Also, OpenAI ain't missionaries, it's a for profit company full of people working there for a fat paycheck and equity.

Both are orthogonal concepts.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#446

Post by saubeidl »

robocat wrote: post #214
casebash wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, they're actually the bad guys, just folks haven't thought far enough ahead to realise it yet.

> bad guys You imply there are some good guys. What company?

Signal, Proton, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Mastodon, Deepseek.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#447

Post by ethbr1 »

comfysocks wrote: post #262
moralestapia wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't follow. >because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products If that were true they wouldn't be trying to create the best LLM and give it for free. (Disclaimer: I don't think Zuck is doing this out of the good of his heart, obv. but I don't see the connection with the complements and whatnot)

Meta has ad revenue. I think Meta’s play is to make it difficult for pure AI competitors to make revenue through LLMs.

Meta's play is to make sure there isn't an obvious superiority to one company's closed LLM -- because that's what would drive customers to choosing that company's product(s).

If LLM effectiveness is all about the same, then other factors dominate customer choice.

Like which (legacy) platforms have the strongest network effects. (Which Meta would be thrilled about)

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#448

Post by saubeidl »

echelon wrote: post #118
jrm4 wrote: post #76

Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.

Most of Meta's models have not been released as open source. Llama was a fluke, and it helps to commoditize your compliment when you're not the market leader. There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be. A few that contribute to the commons are Deep Seek and Black Forest Labs. But they don't have the same breadth and budget as the hyperscalers.

> There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be.

Deepseek, Baidu.

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#449

Post by noisy_boy »

bluecalm wrote: post #40

Do I "poach" a stock when I offer more money for it than the last transaction value? "Poaching" employees is just price discovery by market forces. Sounds healthy to me. Meta is being the good guys for once.

    s/good guys/willing to pay/

Re: Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

#450

Post by fantispug »

moralestapia wrote: post #228
pydry wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg. He didnt open source anything because he's a "good guy", he's just commoditizing the complement. The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.

>he's just commoditizing the complement That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?

Meta's primary business is capturing attention and selling some of that attention to advertisers. They do this by distributing content to users in a way that maximizes attention. Content is a complement to their content distribution system.

LLMs, along with image and video generation models, are generators of very dynamic, engaging and personalised content. If Open AI or anyone else wins a monopoly there it could be terrible for Meta's business. Commoditizing it with Llama, and at the same time building internal capability and a community for their LLMs, was solid strategy from Meta.

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