Its certainly not altruism. Given that Facebook/Meta owns the largest user data collection systems, any advancement in AI ultimately strengthens their business model (which is still mostly collecting private user data, amassing large user datasets, and selling targeting ads).

There is a demo video that shows a user wearing a Quest VR headset and asks the AI "what do you see" and it interprets everything around it. Then, "what goes well with these shorts"... You can see where this is going. Wearing headsets with AIs monitoring everything the users see and collecting even more data is becoming normalized. Imagine the private data harvesting capabilities of the internet but anywhere in the physical world. People need not even choose to wear a Meta headset, simply passing a user with a Meta headset in public will be enough to have private data collected. This will be the inevitable result of vision models improvements integrated into mobile VR/AR headsets.

That sounds fantastic. If they make the Meta headset easy to wear and somewhat fashionable (closer to eyeglass than to a motorcycle helmet), I'd take it everywhere and record everything. Give me a retrospective search and conferences/meetings will be so much easier (I am terrible with names).

I wouldn’t even say hi alone my name to someone wearing a Meta headset out in public. And if facial recognition becomes that common for wearers, most of the population is going to adorn something to prevent that. And if it’s at work, I’m not working there and I have to think many would agree. Coworkers don’t and wouldn’t tolerate coworkers taking videos or pictures of them.

This is not how the overwhelming majority of the world works though.

> if facial recognition becomes that common for wearers, most of the population is going to adorn something to prevent that

"Most of the population" is going to be "the wearers".

> Coworkers don’t and wouldn’t tolerate coworkers taking videos or pictures of them.

Here is a fun experience you can try: just hit "record" on every single Teams or Meet meeting you're ever on (or just set recording as the default setting in the app).

See how many coworkers comment on it, let alone protest.

I can tell you from experience (of having been in thousands of hours of recorded meetings in the last 3 years) that the answer is zero.

You are probably right, but that is truly a cyberpunk dystopian situation. A few megacorps will catalog every human interaction and there will be no way to opt out.

I'd gladly wear a headset like that! I think you dramatically overestimate the number of people that would actually care about any theoretical privacy infringement here.

> And if facial recognition becomes that common for wearers, most of the population is going to adorn something to prevent that.

In my opinion, you do not have an accurate view of how much the average person cares about this. London is the most surveilled city on the planet with widespread CCTV/facial recognition, as is Washington D.C. and China. But literally no one bothers with anti-surveillance measures.

> I’m not working there and I have to think many would agree. Coworkers don’t and wouldn’t tolerate coworkers taking videos or pictures of them.

This is a very antiquated view IMO. You are already being filmed and monitored at work. I see no issue with a local LLM interpreting my environment, or even a privacy-aware secure LLM deployment like Apple's Private Cloud Compute: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

> I think you dramatically overestimate the number of people that would actually care about any theoretical privacy infringement

Not really surprised that you don't see it as a problem

> This is a very antiquated view IMO. You are already being filmed and monitored at work.

Not really surprised that you don't see it as a problem

> a privacy-aware secure LLM

Funniest thing I've heard all month.

Do read through the linked article. Not sure how you could make cloud compute more private if you tried; apart from homomorphic encryption.

Of course, no Hacker News thread is complete without the "I would never shake hands with an Android user" guy who just has to virtue signal.

> And if facial recognition becomes that common for wearers, most of the population is going to adorn something to prevent that

My brother in Christ, you sincerely underestimate how much "most of the population" gives a shit. Most people are being tracked by Google Maps or FindMy, are triangulated with cell towers that know their exact coordinates, and willingly use social media that profiles them individually. The population doesn't even try in the slightest to resist any of it.

That's very dystopian. It's bad enough having cameras everywhere now. I never opted in to being recorded.

I really think the value of this for Meta is content generation. More open models (especially state of the art) means more content is being generated, and more content is being shared on Meta platforms, so there is more advertising revenue for Meta.

All the content generated by llms (good or bad) is going to end up back in Facebook/Instagram and other social media sites. This enables Meta to show growth and therefore demand a higher stock price. So it makes sense to get content generation tools out there as widely as possible.

You can always listen to the investor calls for the capitalist point of view. In short, attracting talent, building the ecosystem, and making it really easy for users to make stuff they want to share on Meta's social networks

He's not even pretending it's altruism. Literally about 1/3 of the entire post is the section titled "Why Open Source AI Is Good for Meta". I find it really weird that there are whole debates in threads here about whether it's altruistic when Zuckerberg isn't making that claim in the first place.

He addresses this pretty clearly in the post. They don't want to be beholden to other companies to build the products they want to build. Their experience being under Apple's thumb on mobile strongly shaped this point of view.

Zuckerberg didn't really say anything about altruism. The point he was making is an explicit "I believe open models are best for our business"

He was clear in that one of their motivations is avoiding vendor lockin. He doesn't want Meta to be under the control of their competitors or other AI providers.

He also recognizes the value brought to his company by open sourcing products. Just look at React, PyTorch, and GraphQL. All industry standards, and all brought tremendous value to Facebook.