Sure, but it's significantly behind GPT-4, and somewhat behind GPT-3.5. Could they make money on it, with a paid service, if they tried?
If they actually had something competitive, that say beat GPT-4, or approached best-in-class in the future, would the still give it away for free?
My naive, but seemingly obvious, assumption is that they are doing this first for actual R&D, because they are behind, second for promoting the use of AI, both with the end goal of profit from a closed source model that is actually competitive.
What motive do you see for them releasing these models for free, especially with the massive increase in cost associated with catching up?
Owning a platform. Zuck's dream.
They put tons of money into these models, nurture an ecosystem of companies built around them, and then start gradually figuring out a licensing model for the ones that take off.
My bet is that Meta has pivoted almost entirely to this space with their R&D this year. Llama 2 is spectacular. And with its' success, there will undoubtedly be more. They also happen to have access to limitless amounts of compute, cash, and engineering that puts OpenAI to shame. This could finally be their chance to create a platform for real. And the open source community and startups will benefit off of that.