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…
Why is Meta doing it though? This is an astronomical investment. What do they gain from it?
But what is less understood is that from his point of view, Facebook went through a near death experience when mobile happened. Apple and Google nearly "stole" it from him by putting strict controls around the next platform that happened, mobile. He lives every day even still knowing Apple or Google could simply turn off his apps and the whole dream would come to an end.
So what do you do in that situation? You swear - never again. When the next revolution happens, I'm going to be there, owning it from the ground up myself. But more than that, he wants to fundamentally shift the world back to the premise that made him successful in the first place - open platforms. He thinks that when everyone is competing on a level playing field he'll win. He thinks he is at least as smart and as good as everyone else. The biggest threat to him is not that someone else is better, it's that the playing field is made arbitrarily uneven.
Of course, this is all either conjecture or pieced together from scraps of observations over time. But it is very consistent over many decisions and interactions he has made over many years and many different domains.