A continuous stream of monetizable live user data?

The entire point of Meta owning everything is that it wants as much of your data stream as it can get, so it can then sell more ad products derived from that.

If much of that data begins going off-Meta, because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products, that's a huge loss to Meta.

Sorry, I don't follow.

>because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products

If that were true they wouldn't be trying to create the best LLM and give it for free.

(Disclaimer: I don't think Zuck is doing this out of the good of his heart, obv. but I don't see the connection with the complements and whatnot)

Meta has ad revenue. I think Meta’s play is to make it difficult for pure AI competitors to make revenue through LLMs.

Meta's play is to make sure there isn't an obvious superiority to one company's closed LLM -- because that's what would drive customers to choosing that company's product(s).

If LLM effectiveness is all about the same, then other factors dominate customer choice.

Like which (legacy) platforms have the strongest network effects. (Which Meta would be thrilled about)

That’s not commoditising the complement!

I’m not the poster that said it was that.

I think its about sapping as much user data from competitors. A company seeking to use an LLM has a choice between OpenAI, LLaMA, and others. If they choose LLaMA because it's free and host it themselves, OpenAI misses out on training data and other data like that

Well is the loss of training data from customers using self-hosted Llama that big a deal for OpenAI or any of the big labs at this point? Maybe in late-2022/early-2023 during the early stages of RLHF'd mass models but not today I don't think. Offerings from the big labs have pretty much settled into specific niches and people have started using them in certain ways across the board. The early land grab is over and consolidation has started.

Meta's primary business is capturing attention and selling some of that attention to advertisers. They do this by distributing content to users in a way that maximizes attention. Content is a complement to their content distribution system.

LLMs, along with image and video generation models, are generators of very dynamic, engaging and personalised content. If Open AI or anyone else wins a monopoly there it could be terrible for Meta's business. Commoditizing it with Llama, and at the same time building internal capability and a community for their LLMs, was solid strategy from Meta.

So, imagine a world where everyone but Meta has access to generative AI.

There's two products:

A) (Meta) Hey, here are all your family members and friends, you can keep up with them in our apps, message them, see what they're up to, etc...

B) (OpenAI and others) Hey, we generated some artificial friends for you, they will write messages to you everyday, almost like a real human! They also look like this (queue AI generated profile picture). We will post updates on the imaginary adventures we come up with, written by LLMs. We will simulate a whole existence around you, "age" like real humans, we might even get married between us and have imaginary babies. You could attend our virtual generated wedding online, using the latest technology, and you can send us gifts and money to celebrate these significant events.

And, presumably, people will prefer to use B?

MEGA lmao.

Their primary product: advertisements.

It takes content to sell advertisements online. LLMs produce an infinite stream of content.

VR/metaverse is dead in the water without gen AI. The content takes too long to make otherwise