Maybe, but at some point vague strategic moves like that will need to actually justify themselves at the earnings call. Throwing endless millions of dollars down the drain to what, depreciate the value of another companies product, which doesn't even directly compete with Metas main breadwinners? What do they actually get out of this?
I suppose if there's any consolation for the open-source AI community it's that Meta has demonstrated a willingness to burn a lot of money for unclear benefit, they're still single-handedly keeping the VR industry on life support at the expense of about $4 billion per quarter. A decade on from acquiring Oculus and no closer to making it profitable, if Metas AI efforts get the same treatment then the free models will probably keep coming for a while.
Zuckerberg's reasoning on AI/ML seemed very justifiable to me in the Dwarkesh podcast
IIRC,
- Having a better model is a competitive advantage in fighting against spam
- Better models enables facebook itself to understand their code vulnerabilities, better employee productivity etc.
- Being in the frontier of open source, keeps them at an advantage in terms of updates from community
Also Meta is in the business of sharing content. Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp are all about sharing content.
They’re highly incentivized to expand the options for generating content. OpenAI and Anthropic have to make money from the generation, which raises the barrier to creation. Meta can say fuck it, let everyone create and well sell ads against what they create.
I suppose if there's any consolation for the open-source AI community it's that Meta has demonstrated a willingness to burn a lot of money for unclear benefit, they're still single-handedly keeping the VR industry on life support at the expense of about $4 billion per quarter. A decade on from acquiring Oculus and no closer to making it profitable, if Metas AI efforts get the same treatment then the free models will probably keep coming for a while.