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vineyardmiketoday at 6:18 PM0 repliesview on HN

The goal is not for meta to take their market, the goal would be for meta to damage their competitors.

If meta releases an open-weight LLM that is not Chinese made, cheaper to run than the SOTA premiums, etc, it would lower the number of people paying for frontier labs models. We saw with with early LLAMA models, but they didn’t keep up in the race with v4.

Meta would benefit from this, not from increased revenue at the hands of open LLMs, but from reduced competition. Meta competes with Google for ad spend, and lowering the Google revenue (or increasing costs) from AI reduces the competitive advantage. OpenAI wants to build an ad engine, so same thing will apply there too - make it less-revenue-generating to compete. Meanwhile G, OpenAI, and Anthropic are huge talent sinks that they have to compete with, especially for ML talent which is core to Metas business goals (ads). Finally, Meta needs lots of GPUs to train their ad engine models. By reducing the revenue-per-GPU of these labs, they’re reducing demand on a core revenue generating supply they have to compete for.