this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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That's totally fair and I knew that would be controversial. I'm very heavily focused on AI professionally and I give very few shits about social media, so maybe my perspective is a little different. The fact that there is an active open source AI community owes a ton to Meta training and releasing their Llama LLM models as open source. Training LLMs is very hard and very expensive, so Meta is functionally subsidizing the open source AI community, and their role I think is pretty clearly very positive in that they are preventing AI from being entirely controlled by Google and OpenAI/Microsoft. Given the stakes of AI, the positive role Meta has played with open source developers, it's really hard to be like "yeah but remember CA 7 years ago and what about how Facebook rotted my uncle's brain!"
All of that said, I'm still not buying a quest, or signing up for any Meta social products, I don't like or trust them. I just don't have the rage hardon a lot of people do.
Big difference between "large company tries to undermine its competitors" and "large company is working with people to advance new tech."
Meta is using open source to try and slow down its 2 biggest enemies in the field who have better funding and resources. That open source benefits the masses is incidental and likely regretful from metas perspective. They just dont have a better option to prevent themselves being left in the dust.
I'm not going to argue Meta doesn't have a profit incentive here, but if they just wanted to slow down their rivals they could have closed source their model and released their own product using the model, or shared it with a dozen or so promising startups. They gain nothing by open sourcing, but did it anyway. Whatever their motivations, at the end of the day they opened sourced a model, so good for them.
I really dislike being in the position of defending Meta, but the world is not all black and white, there are no good guys and bad guys. Meta is capable of doing good things, and maybe overtime they'll build a positive reputation. I honestly think they are tired of being the shitty evil company that everyone hates, who is best known for a shitty product nobody but boomers uses, and have been searching for years now for a path forward. I think threads, including Activitypub, and Llama are evidence that their exploring a different direction. Will they live up to their commitments on both Activitypub and open source, I don't know, and I think it's totally fair to be skeptical, but I'm willing to keep an open mind and acknowledge when they do good things and move in the right direction.
Im also sure they are sick of their reputation.
I just dont see how open sourcing a new type of tech that is riddled with ethical issues over intellectual property rights and content replacement in a way that doesnt actually really address those ethical questions has done anything to change their reputation.
Id love to see them move in a right direction. But I dont think chasing the heels of their competitors swinging a bolas in the hopes of catching a dropped lunch is the right direction.
(And if you dont wanna keep arguing it 100% fair, but they definitely benefit from open sourcing their work.)