alt Hacker NewsIs this "I'm losing so I think we should change the rules"? Because it seems like that.
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It’s “I’m losing so I’ll try something else”. It’s what any rational actor in a market economy would do, and it should be encouraged. “I’m winning so I’ll pull up the ladder behind me” is what we want to avoid.
It's the same game that's been played since the invention of commerce.
I think the plan is to move on to selling compute. So yeah, open your models so people can pay to run them on Meta hardware.
meta playing spoiler, yeah. fun stuff!
It makes strategic sense for Meta to want ai in general to be open. Their own product strategy focuses on utilizing the ai to make their customers consume more ads, not selling the raw intelligence. When you look at it from that frame it’s clear that metas goal is to make it so that have free access to the best ai, not that the market size of selling intelligence grows.
Yeah? Everyone everywhere does that all the time. That's the first rule of business: try to game the system.
And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.
"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
\- Mark Zuckerberg[0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
That, and also redefining what a word "open" means, helps him avoid direct financial and criminal responsibility for stealing other people's data. Not that there was any real chance of that ever, but he is reducing that remaining 0.000000001% chance even lower.
It’s a long term pattern. When you’re winning (Anthropic), you keep the tech closed and try to monetize it as much as possible. When you’re losing (Meta), you open it up or drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down while you prepare a “standard” version of it. You also highlight how altruistic and morally good you are for having done so. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s all a game.