I feel like this move's the goalposts a little bit. In the recent MFTF thread people compared the entire 70 years of fusion research funding (about 80 Bn USD) to the Apollo program. This is in the context that the research is heavily underfunded given its applications and potential viability. If we agree that society got an Apollo Program's worth of value out of the Apollo Program, what value has society gained from Facebook's resource usage? A more effective manipulation engine?
Valid question. But one thing is public and the other thing is (kinds of) private, so no they aren’t comparable. Besides, Meta open sourced their results, so in my opinion they should deserve a better status, allow them to access resource and indemnity like libraries. Perhaps only if they spin off their AI research into a non-profit entity, but yeah open source is digital public good and deserve a special status.
