It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safety/ethics types, when very facile takes still has a lot of sway (I think we’ll feel the same in three years about the current Fable stuff). It may have been hard for Meta to just release it outright.

What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.

I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.