Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why Meta Open-Sources Its AI 36
Mark Zuckerberg explaining why Meta open-sources its AI on an earnings call Thursday: I know that some people have questions about how we benefit from open sourcing, the results of our research and large amounts of compute. So I thought it might be useful to lay out the strategic benefits here. The short version is that open sourcing improves our models. And because there's still significant work to turn our models into products because there will be other open-source models available anyway, we find that there are mostly advantages to being the open-source leader, and it doesn't remove differentiation for our products much anyway. And more specifically, there are several strategic benefits.
First, open-source software is typically safer and more secure as well as more compute-efficient to operate due to all the ongoing feedback, scrutiny and development from the community. Now this is a big deal because safety is one of the most important issues in AI. Efficiency improvements and lowering the compute costs also benefit everyone, including us.
Second, open-source software often becomes an industry standard. And when companies standardize on building with our stack, that then becomes easier to integrate new innovations into our products. That's subtle, but the ability to learn and improve quickly is a huge advantage. And being an industry standard enables that.
Third, open source is hugely popular with developers and researchers. And we know that people want to work on open systems that will be widely adopted. So this helps us recruit the best people at Meta, which is a very big deal for leading in any new technology area. And again, we typically have unique data and build unique product integrations anyway, so providing infrastructure like Llama as open source doesn't reduce our main advantage. This is why our long-standing strategy has been to open source general infrastructure and why I expect it to continue to be the right approach for us going forward.
First, open-source software is typically safer and more secure as well as more compute-efficient to operate due to all the ongoing feedback, scrutiny and development from the community. Now this is a big deal because safety is one of the most important issues in AI. Efficiency improvements and lowering the compute costs also benefit everyone, including us.
Second, open-source software often becomes an industry standard. And when companies standardize on building with our stack, that then becomes easier to integrate new innovations into our products. That's subtle, but the ability to learn and improve quickly is a huge advantage. And being an industry standard enables that.
Third, open source is hugely popular with developers and researchers. And we know that people want to work on open systems that will be widely adopted. So this helps us recruit the best people at Meta, which is a very big deal for leading in any new technology area. And again, we typically have unique data and build unique product integrations anyway, so providing infrastructure like Llama as open source doesn't reduce our main advantage. This is why our long-standing strategy has been to open source general infrastructure and why I expect it to continue to be the right approach for us going forward.
Why is it that even if he does something like this (Score:5, Insightful)
I sit here and wonder "how's he gonna rape my privacy this time, and how the hell do I stop him?"
Re: Why is it that even if he does something like (Score:5, Insightful)
Deleting your Meta accounts is the first step to un-Zucking yourself.
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For pretty much everyone, meta created services that are so good at what they do, privacy rape is an acceptable cost.
Want to find out what your neighbourhood is talking about? Facebook.
Want to actually hook up with eligible single women in your area? Instagram.
Want to communicate with pretty much everyone without accruing any costs for calls, SMS/MMS and video calls that works across the planet? Whatsapp.
Etc.
I would argue that the main problems are twofold, and neither of them are solved by "deleting your m
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Nextdoor.com
Countless other dating sites
Countless other chat apps
Etc
For various reasons I have 5 Facebook accounts. All have been idle for years. I use privacy and tracking blockers. If they want to profile me they're going to pay others for the data making my data cost them more than it's worth. If everyone did similar Zuckerberg would be serving fries.
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I didn't say Meta doesn't have competition. I merely stated that they are clear cut market leaders. If you want the dregs, you're free to go for the rest.
Normal people prefer to use the market leader with best access, because they have better things to do with their time, and prefer to minimize their time spent on administrative tasks, and maximize time available for everything else.
Chatting, looking for dates etc is administrative tasks for normal people. They suck. So you take the single most efficient wa
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I didn't say I am protected. I said I am more expensive to follow and track.
If you want to surrender to Zuck that's your call. He offers me absolutely nothing of value.
Re: Why is it that even if he does something like (Score:2)
That is the point. He provides value to billions of other people, ergo deleting your account is not the answer. He does not care about you, Mr statistical error.
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And my point is he's not the only game in town.
So again, there are other options for everything he does. Only user inertia and laziness keeps him from serving fries with that. FB has nothing of unique value. Obviously, I am nothing by myself. But again, if everyone did the same as me, he'd be fry guy. I'm not sure how many times I have to say the same thing or how it's possible to be any clearer.
Btw, I didn't delete my account. I have 5 I haven't logged into in years as I said before.
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It is irrelevant if he has competition that is much worse than his products. This argument is desperate and foolish.
As for "user inertia and laziness", there are horrible things done in the name of keeping our civilization going. If you weren't suffering from user inertia and laziness, you would've built yourself a cabin in the woods and live there outside the civilization.
But you don't. Just like everyone else. Because "user inertia and laziness" actually has a different, much better less emotionally loade
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Who says the others are worse than his?
People use his stuff because they were bought or from inertia for the core FB site.
I have no idea wtf you're talking about log cabins for but you do you, bro.
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>Who says the others are worse than his?
Humanity as a whole.
>People use his stuff because they were bought or from inertia for the core FB site.
Reality check: when Instagram was purchased, it had what, eight employees? Was it big or relevant? Did it have any meaningful overlap in userbase with facebook?
The answers are yes, no, and no respectively.
Similar things apply to whatsapp.
This is one thing that people in general really should control. When their hatred of X makes them cognitively blind to why X
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They still track the shit out of you (Score:3)
If you want privacy you need laws. And if you want laws you have to stop being distracted by culture war BS and change how you vote. Vote in primary elections too.
Americans don't like hearing that because we don't like having to rely on group action like voting. Too many 80s one man army action movies. We all think we're John Matrix or something...
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Well that's a gross generalization of Americans if I've ever seen one. The biggest problem with voting for a solution is both our major political parties are corporate sellouts. Neither one actually cares. Democrats do a better show of pretending to care but when the tire hits the pavement that act in remarkably similar ways when it comes to governing. Sure, there are differences and certain hot button "culture war" issues but beyond that, not so much difference.
A lot of us are just apathetic to the entire
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As long as you're using a "plurality rules" voting system, two parties is the optimal strategy. If you were using an Instant Runoff or Condorcet voting system, then voting for minority party candidates would make sense. But then you've got the information overload problem, where you need to decide what your preference order for the candidates is. That's already more than many people chose to handle in a two-party system.
Sometimes I think that every law should have both an limited duration and a maximum l
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I don't have one. But that doesn't mean that shadow profiles aren't a thing, and as soon as someone manages to identify you, you have a profile.
Like it or not.
Re:Why is it that even if he does something like t (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm much the same - his goose is cooked - I'm always looking for his ulterior motives.
Sadly, this statement doesn't hint at what at what those other motives might be (if they exist, I suppose?). In terms of what privacy he's eroded for this project, I'd imagine it's all buried deep in the models. Hard to see for sure of course, but I'll bet there's all kinds in the training data.
On a happier note, I'd say that he puts the reasons for open-sourcing innovation in very succinct and compelling terms though. A handy bit of copy-pasta source for anyone looking to justify similar things to their PHBs.
Despite his eloquence here though, I still don't trust him :-(
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I'm much the same - his goose is cooked - I'm always looking for his ulterior motives.
Sadly, this statement doesn't hint at what at what those other motives might be (if they exist, I suppose?). In terms of what privacy he's eroded for this project, I'd imagine it's all buried deep in the models. Hard to see for sure of course, but I'll bet there's all kinds in the training data.
On a happier note, I'd say that he puts the reasons for open-sourcing innovation in very succinct and compelling terms though. A handy bit of copy-pasta source for anyone looking to justify similar things to their PHBs.
Despite his eloquence here though, I still don't trust him :-(
There is no ulterior motive. It's the same goal of every company, make as much money as possible. Zuck initially created Facebook to meet women in college and it grew from there.
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Run his AI in a sandbox with only access to 4chan.
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Stop fetching resources from his servers. He can't track you, if you stop giving him the data to do it.
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I wish it was that easy.
Someone takes a picture, puts it up on his Facebook page, I happen to be in that picture and another data point for my shadow profile gets added.
The problem isn't that I'm not careful to avoid handing over data. The problem is that at lot of other people aren't.
training data is the secret sauce (Score:5, Insightful)
The software is constantly evolving but the curation of effective training data is likely to be the biggest factor when comparing AI/DL businesses to each other. In the end it is about what your system can accomplish in the real world and not what secrets you hide in your source code from your competitors
Also, FB *IS NOT* releasing the weights (Score:3)
While FB FOSSes the source code of the model (and that has to be lauded), they do not make available neither the training set, nor the weights of the fully trained model (and they do not need to, BTW).
That means that, even being FOSS, they retain enough secret sauce. If I were an investor, I would not be too worried
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That's not the issue. Most people don't care about that; we just care about having the foundation available.
The issue is that the license isn't actually open - it just pretends to be, in an insidious manner. There's two particular gotchas that work together:
1) The outputs can only be used to train other LLaMA-licensed models, not third-party models
2) If any model becomes extremely widely used, it has to be licensed with Meta.
#1 means that the license is viral. Most developers don't pay attention to license
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I don't advise doing your own lawyering, and if you feel like risking an e.g. vicarious liability, contributory liability, or unjust enrichment suit, you should at least
know that secondary liability is a thing, you don't have to have a signed relationship with the infringer (it can be implicit), and the fact that you didn't personally sign the license doesn't mean that you can't be cha
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** sued
** witchcraft
Commoditize supply chain (Score:1)
Cynically (Score:2)
A couple things are true LLMs and generative AI are useful enough with enough practical applications they will endure in the IT tool box, a long side things like the relational database.
The real winner will be whoever finds a way to do the compute around them cheaply and all other things being equal gets a feature parity product to market first.
The compute part remains an unsolved problem; but patent issues aside one that will be likely easy enough to replicate once solved. It it certainly to the interest t