38:30 Zuckerberg states that they won't release models once they're sufficiently powerful.
It's OpenAI again, facebook has burnt all customer trust for years and the fact they changed their name to "Meta" actually worked.
1. It attracts the world's best academic talent, who deeply want their work shared. AI experts can join any company, so ones which commit to open AI have a huge advantage.
2. Having armies of SWEs contributing millions of free labor hours to test/fix/improve/expand your stuff is incredible.
3. The industry standardizes around their tech, driving down costs and dramatically improving compatibility/extensibility.
4. It creates immense goodwill with basically everyone.
5. Having open AI doesn't hurt their core business. If you're an AI company, giving away your only product isn't tenable (so far).
If Meta's 405B model surpasses GPT-4 and Claude Opus as they expect, they release it for free, and (predictably) nothing awful happens -- just incredible unlocks for regular people like Llama 2 -- it'll make much of the industry look like complete clowns. Hiding their models with some pretext about safety, the alarmist alignment rhetoric, will crumble. Like...no, you zealously guard your models because you want to make money, and that's fine. But using some holier-than-thou "it's for your own good" public gaslighting is wildly inappropriate, paternalistic, and condescending.
The 405B model will be an enormous middle finger to companies who literally won't even tell you how big their models are (because "safety", I guess). Here's a model better than all of yours, it's open for everyone to benefit from, and it didn't end the world. So go &%$# yourselves.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
That's specifically why OpenAI don't release weights, and why everyone who cares about safety talks about laws, and why Yud says the laws only matter if you're willing to enforce them internationally via air strikes.
> It’s going to be so satisfying
I won't be feeling Schadenfreude if a low budget group or individual takes an open weights model, does a white-box analysis to determine what it knows and to overcome any RLFH, in order to force it to work as an assistant helping walk them though the steps to make VX nerve agent.
Given how old VX is, it's fairly likely all the info is on the public internet already, but even just LLMs-as-a-better-search / knowledge synthesis from disparate sources, that makes a difference, especially for domain specific "common sense": You don't need to know what to ask for, you can ask a model to ask itself a better question first.
As you said the information is already out there - getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is.
If you think it's "laughable", what do you think tools are for? Every tool makes some difference, that's why they get used.
The better models are already at the level of a (free) everything-intern, and it's very easy to use them for high-level control of robotics.
> getting info on how to do this stuff is not the barrier you think it is.
Knowing what question you need to ask in order to not kill oneself in the process, however, is.
Secondary school chemistry lessons taught me two distinct ways to make chlorine using only things found in a normal kitchen; but the were taught in the context "don't do X or Y, that makes chlorine", not "here's some PPE, let's get to work".
Wonder if it's true?
It seems similar to open chip designs - irrelevant to people who are going to buy whatever chips they use anyway. Maybe I'll design a circuit board, but no deeper than that.
Modern civilization means depending on supply chains.
Anything better than that starts at 200k per machine and goes up from there.
Not something you can run at home, but definitely within the budget of most medium sized firms to buy one.
Got 3.5-4 tokens/s, GPU compute was <20% busy (~90W) and the 16 CPU cores / 32 threads were about 50% busy.
If so, then the parent comment’s sentiment holds true…. Exciting stuff.
It's a thing to admire, *even if you dislike the products*. Much the same as you can be awed by Ray Kroc's execution regardless of whether you like McDonald's or what you think of him personally.
It simply isn't that common to have that combination of talents at work on one thing at such scale for so long. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had the same combo of really being down in the details despite reaching such heights.
You can contrast to Google, a company whose founders had similar traits but who got tired of it. Totally understandable, but it makes a difference in terms of the focus of google today.
Again this is true regardless of what you think of Meta on, say, privacy vs. Google's original "Don't be Evil" idea.
Saying "wow they still have engineering leadership" is hardly worship. It's a statement of fact.
He really is the last man standing from the web 2.0 days. I would have never believed I'd say this 10 years ago, but we're really fortunate for it. The launch of Quest 3 last fall was such a breath of fresh air. To see a CEO actually legitimately excited about something, standing on stage and physically showing it off was like something out of a bygone era.
Anyways, what we're now seeing is this mindset reflected in a new way with LLMs - Meta would rather that the next big thing belongs to everybody, than to a competitor.
I'm really glad they've taken that approach, but I wouldn't delude myself that it's all hacker-mentality altruism, and not a fair bit of strategic cynicism at work here too.
If Zuck thought he could "own" LLMs and make them a walled garden, I'm sure he would, but the ship already sailed on developing a moat like that for anybody that's not OpenAI - now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible.
It's this, and by making it open and available on every cloud out there would make this accessible to other start ups who might play in Meta's competitor's spaces.
Purely my opinion as a long time Apple fan, but I cant help but think that Tim Cook's polices are harming the Apple brand in ways that we wont see for a few years.
Much like Balmer did at Microsoft.
But who knows - I'm just making conversation :-)
If Apple didn’t try and fail with Newton[0] (which was too early to the market for many reasons, both tech-related and not), we might’ve not had iPhone today. The engineering mindset would be to analyze how and why it happened the way it did, assess whether you can address those issues well, decide whether to proceed again or not (and how), and then execute. Obsessing over a perfect track record is the opposite of the engineering mindset imo.
For all we know, VRChat as a concept of that kind is a local maximum, and imo it wont scale well to genpop. Not claiming this as an objective fact, but as a hypothesis that I personally believe to be very likely truthful. Think of it as a dead branch of evolution, where if you want to go further than that local maximum, you gotta break out of it using an entirely different approach.
I like VRChat, but thinking that a random person living in the mainstream who isnt into that type of geeky online stuff is gonna be convinced of VRChat being the ultimate metaverse experience is just foolish.
At that point, your choices are: (1) build a VRChat clone and hit that same local maximum but slightly higher at best or (2) develop something entirely different to get out of that local maximum, but risk failing (since it is a totally novel thing) and coming short of being at least as successful as VRChat. Zuck took the second option, and I respect that.
Just making a VRChat Meta Edition clone would imo give Meta much better numbers in the short-term (than their failed Meta Horizons did), but imo long-term that approach would lead them nowhere. And it seems like Meta is more interested in capturing the first-mover (into the mainstream) advantage heavy.
And honestly, I think it is better off this way. Just like if someone is making yet another group chat, i would prefer they went balls to the wall, tried to rethink things from scratch, and made a group chat app that is unlike any other ones out there. Could all of their novel approaches fail? Yes, much more likely than if they made another slack clone with a different color scheme. But the important part is, it also has a much higher chance to get the state of their niche oit of the local maximum.
Examples: Twitter could’ve been just another blog aggregator, Tesla could’ve been just another gas-powered Lotus Elise (with the original roadsters literally being just their custom internals slotted into a Lotus body), Microsoft would’ve been stuck with MS-DOS and not went into the “app as the main OS” thing (which is what they did with Windows).
Apple would’ve been relegated to a legacy of Apple II and iPod (with a dash of macbook relevancy), and rememebered as the company that made this ultra popular mp3 player before that whole niche died. Airpods (that everyone laughed at initially and lauded as an impractical pretentious purchase) are massive now, with every holdout that I personally know who finally got them recently going “i cannot believe how convenient it is, i should’ve gotten them earlier”, but it was also a similar “who needs this, they are solving a problem nobody has, everyone prefers wired with tons of better options” take[0].
If you want to get out of a perceived local maximum and break into the mainstream, you gotta try brand new approaches that would likely fail. Going “omg cannot even beat that existing competitor that’s been running for years” is kinda pointless in this case, because competing with them directly by making just a better and more successful clone of their product was never the goal. I don’t doubt even for a second that if Meta tried that, they would’ve likely accomplished it.
And for the naysayers who don’t see Meta ever breaking things out of a local maximum, just look at the Oculus Quest line. Everyone was laughing at them initially for going with the standalone device approach, but Quest has become a massive hit, with tons of people of all kinds buying it (not just people with massive gaming rigs).
0. And yes, removal of the audiojack somewhat speeded up the adoption, but I just used an adapter with zero discomfort for a year or two until i got airpods myself (and would’ve still continued using the adapter if I just didnt flatout preferred airpods in general).
Apple photos and FaceTime are good products for sharing information without ruining your attention span or bring evil. Facebook could’ve been like that.
Maybe I am an outlier, but when in a conversation about work-related things someone asks “what do you like to do in your free time”, I believe the implication here is that there is a silent “…to do in your free time [outside of work]”.
Answering that question with more stuff related to work project typically falls somewhere on the spectrum between pandering to the audience and cringe.
No idea how this concept can even count as novel on HN, where a major chunk of users that are software devs keep talking about hobbies like woodworking/camping/etc. (aka hobbies that are typically as far removed from the digital realm as possible).
Imo Zuck talking about MMA being his personal free time hobby is about as odd as a software dev talking about being into woodworking. In other words, not at all.
But that said, I don't think it matters. I don't know anybody who hasn't been wrong about something, or made a bad bet at times. Even if he is wrong about everything else (which he's not, because plenty of important open source has come out of facebook), that doesn't change the extreme importance that is Llama and Meta's willingness to open things up. It's a wonderful gift they have given to humanity that has only barely started.
He's well positioned to take that market when it eventually matures a bit. Once the tech gets there, say in a decade we might see most people primarily consume content via VR and phones. That's movies, games, TV, sporting events, concerts.
Similarly, I could imagine sitting next to my daughter, who is 2,500 miles away at college, watching the name together on a virtual screen we both share. And then playing mini-golf or table tennis together.
Different tools are appropriate for different use cases. Don't dismiss a hammer because it's not good at driving screws.
Co-watching TV? Big Screen: https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software
Mini-Golf? Walkabout Mini Golf: https://www.mightycoconut.com/minigolf
Table Tennis? Eleven Table Tennis: https://elevenvr.com/en/
All are amazing, polished experiences in VR that give you a sense of being "present" with someone a continent away.
For me the tech isn't they're yet. I'd buy a Quest with an HDMI input today if they sold it. But for some reason these are two different products
It is still possible that VR and Generative AI can join in some synergy.
Apple famously brought the iPhone into existence without any prior R&D or failed attempts to build similar devices.
Nobody wants to tell the boss his pet project sucks - or to get their buddies laid off. And with Facebook's $100 billion in revenue, nobody's going to notice the cost of a few thousand engineers.
Will metaverse be a failure? Maybe. But Apple doesn't think so to the tune of $100B invested so far, which is pretty good validation there is some value there.
Tablet PC (first iteration was in the early 90s!), Pocket PC, WebTV and Media Center PC (Microsoft first tried Smart TVs in the late 90s! There wasn't any content to watch and most people didn't have broadband, oops), Xbox, and the numerous PC standards they pushed for (e.g. mandating integrated audio on new PCs), smart watches (SPOT watch, look it up!), and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
You'll notice in most of those categories, they moved too soon and others who came later won the market.
He sees the metaverse as the entire shared online space that evolves into a more multi-user collaborative model with more human-centric input/output devices than a computer and phone. It includes co-presence, mixed reality, social sites like Instagram and Facebook as well as online gaming, real-world augments, multiuser communities like Roblox, and "world apps" like VRChat or Horizons.
Access methods may be via a VR headset, or smart glasses, or just sensors that alert you to nearby augmented sites that you can then access on your phone - think Pokemon Go with gyms located at historical real-world sites.
That's what $50B has been spent on, and it's definitely a work in progress. But it sure doesn't seem dead based on the fact that more Quest headsets have been sold than this gen's Xboxes; Apple released Vision Pro; Rayban Smart Glasses are selling pretty well; new devices are planned from Google, Valve, and others; and remote work is an unkillable force.
The online and "real" worlds are only getting more connected, and it seems like a smart bet to try to drive what the next generation looks like. I wouldn't say the $50B was spent efficiently, but I understand that forging a new path means making lots of missteps. You still get somewhere new though, and if it's a worthwhile destination then many people will be following right behind you.
AR glasses in a spectacles form factor was the goal, it’s just to get there a VR headset includes solving a lot of the problems you need to solve for the glasses to work at all.
Apple made the same bet.
and yours did? This comment, Christian?
>>I swear, this feels like people get paid to write positive stuff about him?
----
>you're just snarky and nothing else
Please re-read your own comment. See above.
>So get off my back
Absolutely not. You said something that was decidedly ignorant(how dare people praise x good thing done by omg horrible y people!), and I called you out on it. I expect better discussion and people skills from someone who holds position of a CTO rather than just "haha you're all paid shills!"
If you could have predicted that Internet was going to change our lives and that most people would spend most of their waking hours living their lives on the Internet people probably would have told you that you were a fool in the early days.
The same is true with this prediction of VR. If you think in the next decade that VR is not going to be the home for more and more people then you are wrong.
Apple made the same bet too and had to capitulate to a VR headset + cameras in the end.
The Zuck difference is he pivoted to AI at the right time, Apple didn’t.
There are many things I can criticize Zuck for but lack of sincerity for the mission is not one of them.
Compare Larry & Sergey with Pichai, or Gates with Balmer.
Praise for him at HN? It should be enough of a reason for him to pop a champagne today
I do hate Facebook, but I also love engineers, so I'm not sure how to feel about this one.
"it's complicated". Remember that? :)
It's also a great way to avoid many classes of bias. One shouldn't aspire to "feel" in any one way. Embrace the complexity.
It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams.
Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
That argument could apply to anyone who pays anyone well.
Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.
(And by 'treat well', I mean the whole package. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.)
> Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
Huh, how is that 'dilution' supposed to work?
Well, and at least those 'evil' money grubbers are out of someone else's hair. They don't just get created from thin air. So if those rimarly-compensation-motivated people are now writing software, then at least investment banking and management consulting are free again for the primarily-craft-motivated people to enjoy!
They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate.
Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts.
Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts.
Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families.
Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that. Like our peers in other engineering disciplines, it's practically our baseline state. What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, which is a different thing and gets developed in a different and more stable market environment.
Huh, if I get paid lots as a worker, I don't care whether the company goes belly up later. Why should I? (I include equity in the total pay package under judgement here, and by 'lots' I mean that the sum of equity and cash is big. If the cash portion is large enough, I don't care if the stock goes to zero. In any case, I sell any company stock as soon as I can, and invest the money in diversified index funds.)
> Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts.
I'm more than ok with willing investors (potentially) losing capital they put at risk. Just don't put some captive public retirement fund or task payer money into this. Those investors are grown up and rich, they don't need us to know better what is good for them.
> Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts.
This says more about carefully managing the maximum amount of leverage you want to take on in your life. It's hardy an argument that would convince me that lower pay is better for me.
People freak out when thinking about putting leverage in their stock portfolio, but they take on a mortgage on a house without thinking twice. Even though getting out of a well diversified stock portfolio and remove all the leverage takes less than half an hour these days (thanks to online brokers), but selling your single concentrated illiquid house can take months and multiple percentage points of transaction costs (agents, taxes, etc).
Just don't buy a house, or at least buy within your means. And make sure you are thinking ahead of time how to get out of that investment, in case things turn sour.
> Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families.
Guess who's in a good negotiation position to demand respect and freedom and stability from their (prospective) employer? Someone who has other lucrative offers. Money is one part of compensation, freedom and respect (and even fun!) are others.
Your alternative offers don't all have to offer these parts of the package in the same proportions. You can use a rich offer with lots of money from place A, to try and get more freedom (at a lower pay) from place B.
Though I find that in practice that the places that are valuing me enough to pay me a lot, also tend to value me enough to give me more respect and freedom. (It's far from a perfect correlation, of course.)
> Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that.
Yes, have lived on a pittance before, and survived. I don't strictly 'need' the money. But I still firmly believe that all else being equal that 'more money = more better'.
> What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, [...].
I'd rather take the money, thank you.
If you want to fight, please go ahead, but don't speak for me.
And the whole thing smells a lot like you'd (probably?) want to introduce some kind of mandatory licensing and certificates, like they have in other engineering disciplines. No thank you. Programming is one of the few well paid white collar jobs left where you don't need a degree to enter. Let's keep it that way.
There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".
It's the same as "lowering prices to the benefit of consumer" vs "price dumping to become a monopoly".
Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.
Where has that ever worked? Predatory pricing is highly unlikely.
See eg https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2017/Hendersonpreda... and https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/03/public_schoolin.htm...
> Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.
Please provide some examples.
> There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".
It's up to the workers themselves to decide whether that's a good deal.
And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.
I can also take that offer and shop it around. Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.
Neither of the articles understand how predatory pricing works, assuming it's a single-market process. In the most usual case you fuel price dumping in one market by profits from the other. This way you can run it potentially indefinitely and you're doing it not in a hope of making profits on this market some day but to make sure no one else does. Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works. Netscape died despite having a superior product because it was competing with a public school so to speak. Browser market is dead up to this date.
> And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.
That's exactly what happens and people proceed to degrade professionally.
> Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.
Not unless that someone sits on the ads money pipe.
> Please provide some examples
What kind of example do you expect? If it helps, half the people I personally know in Google "practice the trumpet" in your words. Situation is slowly improving though in the past two years.
I'm not saying it should be made illegal. I'm saying it's definitely happening and it's sad for me to see. I want the tech industry to move forward, not the amateur trumpet one.
> For a period of time, the prices are set unrealistically low to ensure competitors are unable to effectively compete with the dominant firm without making substantial loss. The aim is to force existing or potential competitors within the industry to abandon the market so that the dominant firm may establish a stronger market position and create further barriers to entry.[2] Once competition has been driven from the market, consumers are forced into a monopolistic market where the dominant firm can safely increase prices to recoup its losses.[3]
What you are describing is not predatory pricing, that's a big part of why I was confused.
> Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works.
Please consider reading the article more carefully. Your interpretation requires the author to be an idiot.
---
What you are describing about browsers is interesting. But it's more like bundling and cross subsidies. Neither Microsoft nor Google were ever considering making money from raising the price of their browser after competition had been driven out. That's required for predatory pricing.
Veterinaries (including technicians) have an absurdly high rate of suicide. They have a stressful job, constantly around death and mistreatment situations, and don’t get the respect (despite often knowing more than human doctors) or the salaries to match.
Calling these jobs “cute” or saying the veterinary situation is “fortunate” borders on cruel, but I believe you’re just misinformed.
> Calling these jobs “cute” or saying the veterinary situation is “fortunate” borders on cruel, [...]
Perhaps not the best choice of words, I admit.
The informed reality is that the rate of drop out is also huge. Not only from people who leave the course while studying, but also professionals who abandon the field entirely after just a few years of work.
Many of them are already suffering in college yet continue due to a sense of necessity or sunk cost and burn themselves out.
So no, it does not prove your point. The one thing it proves is that the public in general is insufficiently informed about what being a veterinary is like. They should be paid more and have better conditions (worth noting some countries do treat them better), not be churned out and left to die (literally) because there’s always another chump down the line.
That doesn't really matter. What would matter is how well informed the people who decide to become a veterinary are.
> They should be paid more and have better conditions [...]
Well, everyone should be treated better and paid better.
> [...] because there’s always another chump down the line.
If they could somehow make the improvements you suggest (but don't specify how), they would lead to even more chumps joining the queue.
(And no, that's not a generalised argument against making people's lives better. If you improve the appeal of non-vet jobs, fewer people will join the vet line.
If you improve the treatment of workers in general, the length of the wanna-be-vet queue, and any other 'job queue' will probably stay roughly the same. But people will be better off.)
It's great to enjoy programming, and to enjoy your job. But we live under capitalism. We can't fault people for just working a job.
Pushing for lower salaries won't help anybody.
SWE should enjoy it while they can before salary becomes similar to other engineering trades.
I'm not convinced he's actually done that. Pretty much any 'profitable, sustainable business' can afford software developers.
Software developers are paid pretty decently, but (grabbing a couple of lists off of Google) it looks like there's 18 careers more lucrative than it (from a wage perspective), and computers-in-general are only 3 of the top 25 highest paying careers - https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/best-pay...
Medical, Legal, Finance, and Sales as careers (roughly in that order) all seem to pay more on average.
They were largely left to rely on loyalty and other kinds of fragile non-monetary factors to preserve their existing talent and institutuonal knowledge and otherwise scavenge for scraps when making new hires.
For those companies outside the specific Silicon Valley money circle, it was an extremely disruptive change and recovery basically requires that salaries normalize to some significant degree. In most cases, engineers provide quite a lot of value but not nearly so much value as FAANG and SV speculators could build into their market-shaping offers.
It's not a healthy situation for the industry or (if you're wary of centralization/monopolization) society as a whole.
If FAANG company can hire an engineer overseas for 60k$ annually why other cannot?
Companies that can do that are at an advantage over those who can't right now, but pulling that off is neither trivial nor immediate nor free.
I had teams in North American, Europe, Russia and East Asia. It resulted in a diversified set of engineers who were close to our customers (except in Russia where the engineers were highly qualified but few prospects for sales). Managing across cultures and time zones is a competence. Jet lag from travel was not as great...
What if businesses paid their workers more?
Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.
I joined in 2014, and even I saw the changes in just a few years when I was there.
Still I was a bit baffled reading all the lamenters: I joined late enough that I had no illusions and always saw Google as doing pretty well for an 'enterprise', instead of feeling and expressing constant disappointment that the glory days were over.
They've made it harder for competitors like Google or TikTok to compete with Meta on the basis of "we have a super secret proprietary AI that no one else has that's leagues better than anything else". If everyone has access to a high quality AI (perhaps not the world's best, but competitive), then no one -- including their competitors -- has a competitive advantage from having exclusive access to high quality AI.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Once everyone can do it, then OpenAI value would evaporate.
If you take OpenAI's charter statement seriously, the tech will make most humans' (economic) value evaporate for the same reason.
With one hand it takes, with the other it gives - AI will be in everyone's pocket, and super-human level capable of serving our needs; the thing is, you can't copy a billion dollars, but you can copy a LLaMA.
No current LLM is that, and Transformers may always be too sample-expensive for that.
But if anyone does make such a thing, OpenAI won't mind… so long as the AI is "safe" (whatever that means).
OpenAI has been totally consistent with saying that safety includes assuming weights are harmful until proven safe because you cannot un-release a harmful model; Other researchers say the opposite, on the grounds that white-box research is safety research is easier and more consistent.
I lean towards the former, not because I fear LLMs specifically, but because the irreversibly and the fact we don't know how close or far we are means it's a habit we should turn into a norm before it's urgent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/s/GK57eB2qiz
Some noteworthy quotes that signal the thought process at Meta FAIR and more broadly
* We’re just playing a different game on the infrastructure than companies like Google or Microsoft or Amazon
* We would aspire to and hope to make even more open than that. So, we’ll need to figure out a way to do that.
* ...lead us to do more work in terms of open sourcing, some of the lower level models and tools
* Open sourcing low level tools make the way we run all this infrastructure more efficient over time.
* On PyTorch: It’s generally been very valuable for us to provide that because now all of the best developers across the industry are using tools that we’re also using internally.
* I would expect us to be pushing and helping to build out an open ecosystem.
But what game? What is the AI play that makes giving it away a win for meta?
For facebook, it isn't the technology, but how it is applied, is where their game starts to get interesting.
When you give away the tooling and treat it as first class, you'll get the wider community improving it on top of your own efforts, cycle that back into the application of it internally and you now have a positive feedback loop where other, less open models, lack one.
We don't really know where AI will be useful in a business sense yet (the apps with users are losing money) but a good bet is that incumbent platforms stand to benefit the most once these uses are discovered. What Meta is doing is making it easier for other orgs to find those use-cases (and take on the risk) whilst keeping the ability to jump in and capitalize on it when it materializes.
As for X-Risk? I don't think any of the big tech leadsership actually beleive in that. I also think that deep down a lot of the AI safety crowd love solving hard problems and collecting stock options.
On cost, the AI hype raises Met's valuation by more than the cost of engineers and server farms.
I think Altman actually believes that, but I'm not sure about any of the others.
Musk seems to flitter between extremes, "summoning the demon" isn't really compatible with suing OpenAI for failing to publish Lemegeton Clavicula Samaltmanis*.
> I also think that deep down a lot of the AI safety crowd love solving hard problems and stock options.
Probably at least one of these for any given person.
But that's why capitalism was ever a thing: money does motivate people.
Making AI as open as possible so more people can use it accelerates the rate of content creation
Also google makes most of their money off search, which is more business driven advertising vs showing ads in between user generated content bites
There is also an arms race now of AI vs AI in terms of generating and detecting AI content (incl deepfakes, election interference, etc, etc). In order not to deter advertizers and users, FaceBook need to keep up.
/tinfoil
Releasing Llama puts a bottleneck on developers becoming reliant on OpenAI/google/microsoft.
Strategically, it’s … meta.
Why is selfishness from companies who’ve benefited from social resources not a surprising event vs the norm.
He knows well that if competitors have a cash cow, they have $$ to throw at hundreds of things. By releasing open-source, he is winning credibility, establishing Meta as the most used LLM, and finally weakening the competition from throwing money on the future initiatives.
https://twitter.com/soumithchintala/status/17531811200683049...
But what is less understood is that from his point of view, Facebook went through a near death experience when mobile happened. Apple and Google nearly "stole" it from him by putting strict controls around the next platform that happened, mobile. He lives every day even still knowing Apple or Google could simply turn off his apps and the whole dream would come to an end.
So what do you do in that situation? You swear - never again. When the next revolution happens, I'm going to be there, owning it from the ground up myself. But more than that, he wants to fundamentally shift the world back to the premise that made him successful in the first place - open platforms. He thinks that when everyone is competing on a level playing field he'll win. He thinks he is at least as smart and as good as everyone else. The biggest threat to him is not that someone else is better, it's that the playing field is made arbitrarily uneven.
Of course, this is all either conjecture or pieced together from scraps of observations over time. But it is very consistent over many decisions and interactions he has made over many years and many different domains.
I remember reading years ago that page/brin wanted to build an AI.
This was long before the AI boom, when saying something like that was just weird (like musk saying he wanted to die on mars weird)
What is this? Someone said something nice, and you need to "restore balance"
For example, as we speak, Zuck is lobbying congress to ban Tiktok. Putting aside whether you think it should be banned, this is clearly a cynical strategy with pure self interest in mind. He's trying to monopolize.
Whatever Zuck's strategy with open source is, it's just a strategy. Much like AMD is pursuing that strategy. They're corporations and they don't care about you or me.
Llama is usable by any company under 700M MAU.
https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/
EDIT: Looks like they did open up commercial use with version 2 with the explicit restriction to prevent any major competitor to Meta from using Llama, and that any improvements related to Llama can only apply to Llama. So an attempt to expand the scope of usage and adoption of their proprietary model without their main competitors being able to use it, which still fits my original point.
I get the feeling that the nature of the corporate world is often better understood as a series of rituals to create the illusion of the necessity of the capitalist hierarchy itself. (not that this is exclusive to capitalism, this exists in politics and any system that becomes somewhat self-sustaining) More important than a company doing well is the capacity to use the company as an image/lifestyle enhancement tool for those at the top. So many companies run almost mindlessly as somewhat autonomous machines, allowing pretense and personal egoic myth-making to win over the purpose of the company in the first place.
I think this is why Elon, Mark, Jensen, etc. have done so well. They don't perceive their position as founder/CEOs as a class position: a level above the normal lot that requires a lack of caring for tangible matters. They see their companies as ways of making things happen, for better or for worse.
I don’t really care how much the AI team open sources, the world would be a better place if the entire company ceased to exist.
AI safety risk is substantial. It is also testable. (There are prediction markets on it, for example.) Of course, some companies may latch onto various valid arguments for insincere reasons.
I'd challenge everyone to closely compare ideas such as "open source software is better" versus "state of the art trained AI models are better developed in the open". The exact same arguments do NOT work for both.
It is one thing to publish papers about e.g. transformers. It is another thing to publish the weights of something like GPT 3.5+; it might theoretically be a matter of degree, but that matter of degree makes a real difference, if only in terms of time. Time matters because it gives people and society some time to respond.
Software security reports are often made privately or embargoed. Why? We want to give people and companies time to defend their systems.
Now consider this thought-experiment: assume LLMs (and their hybrid derivatives) enable perhaps 1,000,000 new kinds of cyberattacks, 1,000 new bioweapon attacks, and so on. Are there are a correspondingly large number of defensive benefits? This is the crux of the question I think. First, I don't expect we're going to get a good assessment of the overall "balance". Second, any claims of "balance" are beside the point, because these attacks and defenses don't simply cancel each other out. The distribution of the AI-fueled capability advance will probably ratchet up risk and instability.
Open source software's benefits stem from the assumption that bugs get shallower with more eyes. More eyes means that the open source product gets stronger defensively.
With LLMs that publish their weights, both the research and the implementations is out; you can't get guardrails. The closest analogue to an "OSS security report" would take the form of "I just got your LLM to design a novel biological weapon. Do you think you can use it to design an antidote?"
A systematic risk-averse person might want to ask: what happens if we enumerate all offensive vs defensive technological shifts? Should we reasonably believe that the benefits outweigh the risks?
Unfortunately, the companies making these decisions aren't bearing the risks. This huge externality both pisses me off and scares the shit out of me.
I welcome substantive discussion. Consider this:
https://openai.com/research/building-an-early-warning-system...
I say public persona, as I've never met him, and have no idea what he is like as a person on an individual level.
Maturing in general and studying martial arts is likely to be a contributing factor.
Zuckerberg states during the interview that once the ai reaches a certain level of capability they will stop releasing weights - i.e. they are going the "OpenAI" route: this is just trying to get ahead of the competition, it's a sound strategy when you're behind to leverage open source.
I see no reason to be optimistic about this organization, the open source community should use this an abandon them ASAP.
Not that I even want to make inference requests that would run afoul of the controls put in place by OpenAI and Anthropic (I mostly use it for coding stuff), but I hate the idea of this powerful technology being behind walls and having gate-keepers controlling how you can use it.
Obviously, there are plenty of people and companies out there that also believe in the open approach. But they don't have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and billions in sustainable annual cash flow and literally ten(s) of billions of dollars worth of GPUs! So it's a lot more impactful when they do it. And it basically sets the ground rules for everyone else, so that Mistral now also feels compelled to release model weights for most of their models.
Anyway, Zuck didn't have to go this way. If Facebook were run by "professional" outside managers of the HBS/McKinsey ilk, I think it's quite unlikely that they would be this open with everything, especially after investing so much capital and energy into it. But I am very grateful that they are, and think we all benefit hugely from not only their willingness to be open and share, but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." Thanks Zuck!