I’m thankful that Meta still contributes to open source and shares models like this. I know there’s several reasons to not like the company, but actions like this are much appreciated and benefit everyone.
Wait a minute. I'm no Meta fan, but that leak wasn't internal. llama released their weights to researchers first. The leak was from the initial batch of users, not from inside of Meta. iirc, the model was never meant to be closed weight.
I agree
How can the previous comment be on hacker news ?
Every one here has followed the llama release saga. The famous cheeky PR on their GitHub with the torrent link was genius comedy.
This might make sense for explaining n=1 releases of Llama being open weight. Even OpenAI started with open weight models and moved to closed weight though, so why would this have forever locked Meta into releasing all models as open weight and across so many model families if they weren't really interested in that path as a strategy in its own right?
Sure, but people have the right to ask questions, as for example Zuck's pledge to give away 99% which people pointed out might be a tax avoidance scheme
The retort was essentially "Can't you just be nice?" but people have the right to ask questions; sometimes the questions reveal much corruption that actually does go on
I think it is valid to question why he'd be giving away 99% of his fortune, because let's be honest, Zuck has not proven that he is trustworthy. But at the same time, he could just... Not donate that much.
Yes, the 99% did NOT go straight into non-profits, instead being funneled into his foundation, which has donated millions into actual charitable organizations, but that's arguably millions that wouldn't have otherwise gone to those orgs.
Is it a bit disingenuous to say he's donating 99% of his wealth when his foundation has only donated a few hundred million (or few billion?), which is a single percent of his wealth? Yeah, probably. But a few billion is more than zero, and is undeniably helpful to those organizations.
Not of fan of the company for the social media but have to appreciate all the open sourcing. none of the other top labs release thier models like meta.
> none of the other top labs release thier models like meta
Don't basically all the "top labs" except Anthropic now have open weight models? And Zuckerberg said they were now going to be "careful about what we choose to open source" in the future, which is a shift from their previous rhetoric about "Open Source AI is the Path Forward".
They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they're deploying a classic strategy known as "Commoditize Your Complement"[1], to ward off threats from OpenAI and Anthropic. It's only a happy accident that the little guy benefits in this instance.
Facebook is a deeply scummy company[2] and their stranglehold on online advertising spend (along with Google) allows them to pour enormous funds into side bets like this.
Not even closely OK with facebook. But none of the other companies do this. And Mark has been open about it. I remember him saying in an interview the same very openly. Something oddly respectable about NOT sugar coating with good PR and marketing. Unlike OpenAI.
I spend years working on training these models. Inference is always the fruit. The effort going into getting the data is the most time consuming part. I am not a fan of meta from a long time. But open sourcing the weights help move the field in general. So I have to be thankful for that.
Agreed. The community orientation is great now. I had mixed feelings about them after finding and reporting a live vuln (medium-severity) back in 2005 or so.[1] I'm not really into social media but it does seem like they've changed their culture for the better.
[1] I didn't take them up on the offer to interview in the wake of that and so it will be forever known as "I've made a huge mistake."
If they really deliver a model that can track and describe existing images / videos well that would be a huge breakthrough. There are many extremely useful cases in med, law, surveillance, software and so on. Their competition sucks at this.
Disappointingly, every time Zuck hands out some free shit people instantly forget that he and his companies are a cancer upon humanity. Come on dude, "several reasons to not like the company" doesn't fucking cut it.
