Meta has had a culture of open source, even before their reputation got bad (React, RocksDB, Thrift, folly, etc). They open source a lot of their AI models (instead of just source) because they don't have an enterprise cloud to sell these things, unlike Amazon/Google/Microsoft's offerings (which all offer speech transcription and text to speech as services).

This is an underrated point for Meta. They are good at opensourcing.

I understand that. I’m asking in the context that a number of business commentators have come out and said that Google open sourcing the transformer technology was in itself a big mistake, in hindsight. I think the business side in Meta would have taken a similar view.

My speculation: the repo hasnt been in active development for at least a year, all the main contributors left to found Character.AI, so Meta is open sourcing it because it only rots sitting there and going open means goodwill, and maybe someone else picks it up and runs with it and contributes back to make it more useful.