from Hacker News

Meta's plan to offer free commercial AI models puts pressure on Google, OpenAI

by Andugal on 6/16/23, 5:26 PM with 75 comments

• by Havoc on 6/16/23, 6:38 PM

  Must say I'm genuinely thankful for what Meta has done on this front. Without their research release of llama I think things would have been substantially less democratic.

  This could easily have gone into a "only orgs with billions can play" direction and nobody even trying in the learned helplessness sense. Instead we're ending up in a hybrid "ok maybe can't quite train from scratch but can still tinker" space which is a lot more healthy

  If they want to double down on that then I applaud them

• by AndrewKemendo on 6/16/23, 8:46 PM

  First hit is always free.

  Don’t forget what your dealing with here: The faceless, amoral, infinitely ravenous, maw of the most efficient personal data succubus in history. Make no mistake this is something like “goodwill capture” instead of “regulatory capture.”

  I see no way that this diminishes Meta’s power in any way - arguably it strengthens it by making it easier to choose a Meta architecture instead of creating a competing FOSS architecture.

  So arguably all this does is raise the FOSS bar technically further entrench Meta - AND with the most important thing, having thousands of developers prime their data architectures for Meta models to eventually serve from a Meta account.

  And once it’s widespread enough to lock you in, those commercial terms, whoops they changed!

• by vosper on 6/16/23, 7:21 PM

  This is strategic, right?

  It kicks Google, a competitor for advertising dollars. Some people feel Google is under existential threat from AI (trawling through search results full of spam and ads sucks when an AI can just tell you the answer), by allowing people to build various forms of Google competitor without doing the hard lifting of creating the LLM.

  It kicks OpenAI, too, though Microsoft is perhaps less obviously a competitor to Meta right now. But Microsoft has OpenAI, loads of money, loads of engineers, and lots of product lines, so they might leverage OpenAI's tech lead to _become_ more of a competitor to Meta. It's less of a risk to Meta if OpenAI doesn't have a tech lead anymore.

• by whimsicalism on 6/16/23, 6:44 PM

  Looks like the UAE has beat them to the chase. Never thought I'd be thanking the Emirate for anything, but they did it.

• by rvz on 6/16/23, 5:58 PM

  Great move as Meta is also at the finish line in the race to zero and this indeed pressures both Google and O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com.

  If you are not at the finish line or in open source, you cannot win the race to zero.

• by miohtama on 6/16/23, 6:39 PM

  It's not only free as in beer, but free as in libre, open source models.

  Let's hope it will play for AI is it played for operating systems with Linux.

• by jart on 6/17/23, 8:48 AM

  I love Meta. I thought they had turned to the dark side for the longest time. I've never been so wrong. When Meta released LLaMA it changed my life. I've never seen a company move more leverage to the edge at once. They must be taking notice of how much it's made folks like me adore them. So now we're getting commercial friendly models too? I didn't know Christmas could come twice in one year.

• by smashah on 6/16/23, 8:43 PM

  Cool now Meta please sending Cease & Desist threats to 15 year old OSS devs thanks

• by ilaksh on 6/16/23, 8:10 PM

  Is there any information about when the model will be available or what it is capable of? Anything like a position on a leaderboard or a score related to reasoning or code generation?

  Will it be able to run on AMD's new MI300X? I keep hoping that will put a "chip" in Nvidia's dominance since it seems more efficient.

• by elzbardico on 6/17/23, 12:26 AM

  I have to confess that I never felt very comfortable with the prospect of Microsoft dominating the AI era. This is good news to me.

• by subarctic on 6/16/23, 7:22 PM

  Looks like the original article is here[0], but it's behind a paywall

  [0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-wants-companies...

• by wkat4242 on 6/17/23, 5:06 PM

  Nice, I hope more models like Llama will make it to the community.

  Though I wouldn't mind crowdfunding one either and have it truly open and free though.

• by ldjkfkdsjnv on 6/16/23, 7:28 PM

  Pretty clear they will open source as much as they can to kill off would be competitors.

• by alexcombessie on 6/16/23, 8:35 PM

  I am not sure businesses would trust Meta with their sensitive data. Facebook/Meta brand equity in the B2B domain is severely tarnished, with their long history of lack of respect to data privacy laws and lack of transparency.

  I just don’t see how Meta could possibly turn into a success in the B2B software business. They are a great advertising company, but they’ve never been successful in their other ventures…