Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle.

I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?

Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.

It might be true if it wasn't coming from Meta, but it is coming from Meta. Intelligence is a function of the model and compute. Meta has the capital required to put together world-class compute, but they can't attract the talent required to build world-class models. Given their history of building addictive software to harvest and sell user data for profit, they're the last company we need spearheading how models should be regulated. Nobody trusts Meta to do this.

Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.

http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...

Not if you are worried about the existential threat AI poses. Having easily available AI makes it hardier to regulate, control and limit until we find a way to align AI. Harder to control is a good thing for most technologies, but not for all. A weak analogy is nuclear weapons. if Meta would release and open source some tech that would magically make extremely easy and cheap for everyone to build a nuke, it would not be a positive for society.

Zuck built an empire to sell democracy to the highest bidder and to damage the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money. We must never let anyone forget that for a second.

That said, he is also a powerful enemy of our enemies, so I do not mind taking the win. Anthropic and OpenAIs closed approach to AI is likely to cause way more harm to the world than Zuck ever did.

Open weight is not enough though. We need actually open training models with published searchable training data like AI2 does.

Either we all get access to private, transparent, and accountable superintelligence, or no one should.

I think it's positive and at the very least it's a force countervailing the push to legislate or ban open models in the US

If they were able to make a leading closed model would they be doing it though? It seems like they read the room and saw that this is the only way they can have relevance within LLMs

I think this approach they're taking is to compensate for their inability to compete; they're cynically claiming to support the open-source ecosystem when it's convenient for their marketing. This move reeks of a future rugpull, as Meta is wont to do.

If Zuck gets his way, he gets more control, maybe he gets significant control of the market. Then, he'll probably close his models, if the past is any indication, which leads to bad results.

Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse.

But yeah, open models is a great concept.

If you've seen Zuckerberg for long enough you'll see he doesn't hold any position for all that long. Remember they renamed the entire company for a product idea he basically abandoned. So if he does "the right thing" you can just wait, he'll give up on it pretty soon.

Open weight models are not open software. Its better than closed blackbox models sold by Sam and Mario, but Zuck supporting open weight models when he (and other big boys) hoards all the compute required to run any model, including open weight models only shows that he realized he cant beat Sam and Mario, so wants their leverage to go away.

If you don't trust his intentions, how can you trust anything he does?

Just take the opening of this post:

> We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life.

> The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?

> We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.

I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive.

So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?

This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has espoused the benefit of openness and transparency and how that would create a better society. I get this is a bit different, but the language and sentiment are close enough. Facebook and Instagram are now so closed you cannot view a business page without an account. I think it sold fair to recognize open today does not mean open tomorrow. They want to acquire users and build a platform and that means doing something different than the competition.

We support an open model ecosystem (because we failed to produce a successful closed model).

I think it’s perfectly fine to call out people who intentionally harm children for money out in public in every possible situation.

> The more open source software out there the better.

Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?

Evil people can do things that look good on the surface. He probably has no skin in this game just collecting free karma points.

I don't know about "unquestionably", but yes, I think this is a better path than the proprietary models.

This is not open source; you mean open weight. These models are the antithesis of FOSS. Is it better than hosted models from other big labs? Yes, but not by much from a freedom perspective. especially considering the texts these were trained on. Grumble grumble, these details matter.

I'll always opt for giving companies / people praise for doing the right thing regardless of how infrequently they do so. I hope Mark Zuckerberg keeps open sourcing models.

The thing that makes ist questionable is the dishonesty. It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. If this was something that was dear to them on principle, there are plenty of things that they could have done differently with FB, Insta or WA (to this day).

So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their relatively bad stuff away and play the high and mighty game, because that's all they can do to get returns.

Not a great look – and I would expect that to last about as long as they can't actually monetize their stuff more effectively.

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better.

I say no to both. Of the things we've made on purpose, but excluding where we were actually trying to make them opaque like e.g. cryptography, a trained artificial neural network is the most difficult thing to understand the inner workings of. This makes it a complete pain to even evaluate if one model is better or worse than another for your needs, so we have to mostly outsource these to other people's rankings and hope the score on ARC-AGI-3 or τ-bench or DeepSWE v1.1 or BioMysteryBench or whatever, actually corresponds to something we care about. Which it might do kinda but on the other hand a high score may turn out to be the curse of Goodhart.

Also, as with the Chinese models and the social media feed algorithms, the only way to tell if there's some systemic flaw in it is by analysing the aggregate outcomes. It is claimed (I can't read the laws myself*) that the Chinese government requires models to support the government's worldview about e.g. Tiananmen Square; and we have seen examples of Grok glazing Musk in amusingly stupid ways; so I fully expect something similar from Zuckerberg, e.g. requiring the model to glaze Meta products or propagandise for things Zuckerberg wants as a billionaire.

* every time I try to illustrate how mediocre Google Translate is from English to Chinese, the result is so bad that one of the replies is someone telling me the Chinese example I give is borderline gibberish.

Also, even if I could actually read it, I'm not a lawyer.

Maybe it's good, but I'm going to keep questioning. They are vying for market share. If they cornered it I doubt they would be so open. Morals should not be conditional

It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.

It could be a good thing but I wouldn’t rush to say “unquestionably”. There is a long history of mega corps hijacking open source and open standards for their own ends and leaving the space infinitely worse.

I mean, I can question if this is a good thing. Here's a quote from Zuck's blog post:

"Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."

Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!

I thought open model != open source?

The company that pirated books [1], and is unconditionally opting in all their users into training their AI [2] is releasing "open" models. Awwwww.

[1] 82 TB of books https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

[2] Here's a simple 12-step manusl process to opt-out on Facebook https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html

In short - this is Mark deliberately lying in a way which requires a page of difficult text to explain, which hardly anyone would read and so Mark bets that a majority of the people who will see his claim will believe him.

And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...

All of these companies are just as cutthroat and want to win as the others. But if your name's not OpenAI and Anthropic, you go on the high horse and say everything should be open source. However, if you had a closed model that was winning, I'm sure that's not the argument you would make.

It is dangerous to admire or despise anyone for who they are; it's ok to say someone did something good or bad.

There's a saying "open source is for losers". What it means is that winners in a market don't want open source. The losers in a market push for it to commodify it eliminate the winner's advantage.

Now some of these tech companies open source various libraries but none of it is core to their business. It's marketing, essentially. Or they're trying to get free labor from the community. Google had protocol buffers and Stubby, for example. Facebook had no open source equivalent and didn't have Google's resources so they created Thrift and open sourced it.

Given this, many people, myself included, take Meta releasing open weight models as conceding defeat. They're unable to compete with Google, Anthropic or OpenAI. Their failures in attracting and retaining top AI talent backs this up.

So what you're seeing is people just piling onto Zuckerberg because he seems to have no idea of what to do with Meta. The Metaverse was a $70B+ disaster.

Note that Chinese labs don't fit this model because the Chinese government wants to commodify models as a national security interest.

It's the who, not the what.

Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see?

Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.

Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.

Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see?

Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.

It's not always "unquestionably" good, first because nothing should be unquestionable, second llm models have a very short shelf life, third it comes from Zuck who is an the center of the oligarchy, so questions very much should be asked

Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back

[dead]

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?

We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?

This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

Because there is so much good he could do right now with what he and Meta already have, but they don’t, because it will lose them money.

For example, hiring more people to moderate content on Facebook and stop ads featuring CSAM from being displayed.

Billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by being altruistic. If they say something they’re doing is good for the world, you should be looking at how it will be good for them, because that’s why they’re really doing it.

Will it incidentally do some good for others? Perhaps. Is it a net positive? We’ll see because there’s precious little we can do to stop them from doing whatever they want.

I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.

If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.

A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.