alt Hacker NewsI think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama.
I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.
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That's simply not true. The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked, then llama.cpp was the real game changer which was built from the ground up in depressingly short amount of time. Meta had no choice but to take the L and "support" the open source community. The angry "I-hate-you-and-I-hope-you-die" kind of support.
Open source != open weight. Big difference and it bugs me that nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
Fundamentally I always try to look at incentives. It's not that they are good or bad but that incentives favour certain behaviours.
Google is incentivised to collect a bunch of data (like FB) to improve their ad serving etc. Apple does not have that incentive as they don't make as much off advertising as hardware / app revenue.
NVIDIA is friendly with open source as they want to commoditise the model layer and take the gains in the hardware / data center layer.
I am trying to think what the incentive is here.
Enough good? You are joking, right?
They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
Ha-ha they released nothing. It got leaked and without the source for it. Totally wrong to portray them as benevolent benefactors to the ML race
It was leaked which put it in the open, it got widely popular and they rode the wave. I'm not so such if they would have widely released it if it wasn't leak. Nevertheless mucho credits to them for following up with llama2, llama3, llama4 and now muse.
I have mixed feelings along these lines, I know meta have contributed to various open projects, sometimes Mark pays lip service to “the open internet" while his company represents a constilation of walled gardens. I think PHP got some love, and React is an industry goto (I'm more of a PHP... -> Svelte guy) but are these contributions worth what happened in Myanmar? I say no.
Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests.
When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.
I think this is categorically false. And furthermore comments like this are being used to astroturf and protect reputations of no-good companies and AI slop to keep the bubble growing. Embarrassingly, Mark Zuckerberg spent 80 billion dollars creating Miis for the oculus. The guy also comes off as extremely miserable and delusional in such a unique way that it's possible that there's no real psychological language to describe what is happening to him because his situation is so rare.
Except that Llama's license has restrictions that make it incompatible with the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not... I haven't checked the license of the new models, yet.
Meta is extremely net evil though
It's easy to appear to have good intentions when you're railing against the companies that have decimated your output and made you [Meta] almost irrelevant in the AI 'race'.
llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.
Gaddafi criticized Islamic fanatics; he was basically a good guy in the Middle East.
I mean... I'm sure SS had wives and kids. It doesn't mean we should focus on that while analyzing their impact on the world.
Nobody learned nothing from the metaverse.
I think it's a case of "commoditize your completement" ...
I know I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but the sentence...
"Meta did...kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023"
ignores the majority of open source software history[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
Net good for Meta, they hope
I read this comment in a same way I read "Microsoft in not that bad" comments in 2020.
This is why bad people keep inheriting the earth. We keep forgiving them and they keep doing their crap.
>> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil.
I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
> albeit intentionally
The model was "accidentally" released.
Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know.
Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same.
The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution.
In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc.
The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.
> They've done enough good
Oh, please. Feel free to explain.
Facebook, Meta. 15+ years of emotional, child and human exploitation. Perverted glassware that spies on folk, lobbyists for age verification and who knows what else. They release an open model and all is fine and dandy? Nah.
Please get your priorities straight.
What do you think this Open LLM model is doing if not processing data from their murky sources?
> I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good
“Enough” for what? Surely not enough to offset all the bad they’ve inflicted and allowed on the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
> I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
Zuckerberg has shown through repeated action that he does not deserve any benefit of the doubt. This is the guy who called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him.
This is not even a case of “fool me once” anymore. If you continue to believe Zuckerberg, you’ve been fooled dozens, hundreds of times, and shame is definitely on you.
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Disclaimer, I work on Gemma and open models at Deepmind and the opinions here are my own
There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment.
https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases
https://github.com/google-research/bert
https://github.com/google-research/t5x
If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.