All said and done, it is a very expensive and balsy way to undercut competitors. They’ve spent > $5B on hardware alone, much of which will depreciate in value quickly.

Pretty sure the only reason Meta’s managed to do this is because of Zuck’s iron grip on the board (majority voting rights). This is great for Open Source and regular people though!

Zuck made a bet when they provisioned for reels to buy enough GPUs to be able to spin up another reels-sized service.

Llama is probably just running on spare capacity (I mean, sure, they've kept increasing capex, but if they're worried about an llm-based fb competitor they sort of have to in order to enact their copycat strategy)

Well, he didn't do it to be "nice", you can be sure about that. Obviously they see a financial gain somewhere/sometime

At Meta level, spending $5B to stay competitive is not balsy. It’s a bargain.

I'm perfectly happy with them draining the life essence out of the people crazy enough to still use Facebook, if they're funneling the profits into advancing human progress with AI. It's an Alfred Nobel kind of thing to do.

It's not often you see a take this bad on HN. Wow!

You are aware Facebook tracks everyone, not just people with Facebook accounts, right? They have a history of being anti-consumer in every sense of the word. So while I can understand where you're coming from, it's just not anywhere close to being reality.

If you want to or not, if you consent or not, Facebook is tracking and selling you.

Oh no! Facebook knows who I am!

No they are not selling me. How can they sell my attention to advertisers when I don't look at their ads? How can they influence me if I don't engage with their algorithm? You're the one who's trying to sell me your fear and mistrust.

>selling user generated content and private info to the highest bidder

Was always their modus operandi, surely. How else would they have survived.

Thanks for returning everyone else;s content and never mind all the content stealing your platform did.