[HN Gopher] Meta's plan to offer free commercial AI models puts ...
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Meta's plan to offer free commercial AI models puts pressure on
Google, OpenAI
Author : Andugal
Score : 130 points
Date : 2023-06-16 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.artisana.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.artisana.ai)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Looks like the UAE has beat them to the chase. Never thought I'd
| be thanking the Emirate for anything, but they did it.
| GreedClarifies wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| What the UAE did with Falcon was inspiring, well done! This is
| something that more governments could do.
| version_five wrote:
| Given the choice between equal models from Meta and the group
| that released Falcon, initially with a super shady royalty
| license that they then open sourced, and that nobody had ever
| heard of before, I'd personally go for meta.
|
| Of course, variety is good and I hope the UAE group continues
| to establish themselves as a credible model provider.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't really care what license it was originally released
| on nor do I care if they have been heard of before.
| danielcampos93 wrote:
| See. When you have to convince corporate lawyers and
| security folks that whole switching licenses makes them
| uneasy. BD and legal are much happier to deal with Meta
| than the UAE.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| > initially with a super shady royalty license
|
| I'm surprised this opinion still persists. Royalty-based
| licenses have been used by major game engines [0] for a long
| time, so that's not unprecedented.
|
| [0] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license,
| https://www.cryengine.com/support/view/licensing
| version_five wrote:
| This isn't the first time I've seen this brought up. It's
| irrelevant here for so many reasons. It it unprecedented in
| ML models, the model was promoted as open source, the terms
| were absurd (10% for anything related to it plus some
| reporting requirements, for a foundation model that's not
| even tuned to anything).
|
| In any event, bringing shitty practices from another
| industry into ML doesn't seem worth supporting.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| [flagged]
| smashah wrote:
| Cool now Meta please sending Cease & Desist threats to 15 year
| old OSS devs thanks
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| First hit is always free.
|
| Don't forget what your dealing with here: The faceless, amoral,
| infinitely ravenous, maw of the most efficient personal data
| succubus in history. Make no mistake this is something like
| "goodwill capture" instead of "regulatory capture."
|
| I see no way that this diminishes Meta's power in any way -
| arguably it strengthens it by making it easier to choose a Meta
| architecture instead of creating a competing FOSS architecture.
|
| So arguably all this does is raise the FOSS bar technically
| further entrench Meta - AND with the most important thing, having
| thousands of developers prime their data architectures for Meta
| models to eventually serve from a Meta account.
|
| And once it's widespread enough to lock you in, those commercial
| terms, whoops they changed!
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| As opposed to simply being locked into openai api's as the only
| option?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Is there any information about when the model will be available
| or what it is capable of? Anything like a position on a
| leaderboard or a score related to reasoning or code generation?
|
| Will it be able to run on AMD's new MI300X? I keep hoping that
| will put a "chip" in Nvidia's dominance since it seems more
| efficient.
| vosper wrote:
| This is strategic, right?
|
| It kicks Google, a competitor for advertising dollars. Some
| people feel Google is under existential threat from AI (trawling
| through search results full of spam and ads sucks when an AI can
| just tell you the answer), by allowing people to build various
| forms of Google competitor without doing the hard lifting of
| creating the LLM.
|
| It kicks OpenAI, too, though Microsoft is perhaps less obviously
| a competitor to Meta right now. But Microsoft has OpenAI, loads
| of money, loads of engineers, and lots of product lines, so they
| might leverage OpenAI's tech lead to _become_ more of a
| competitor to Meta. It's less of a risk to Meta if OpenAI doesn't
| have a tech lead anymore.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| How will ai affect facebook? The number of fake news posts,
| even by ordinary people putting themselves in photos, etc, is
| going to really gut the platform of its value, won't it? What
| about when the flood of ai images flood instagram? It's going
| to be a weird decade or two for them
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I noticed a fair bit generated content in my Instagram feed
| lately. It seemed to disappear which was interesting.
|
| I already hate looking at Instagram discover feed, but if
| it's going to turn into MJ discord. I'm really done with it.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| This is aimed squarely at OpenAI (and to a much lesser degree,
| Anthropic). Google is their own worst enemy in this space
| precisely because they are terrified of doing anything that
| will cannibalize their search business and the ad market built
| around it.
| stereolambda wrote:
| If so, it sounds interestingly similar to 1980s-90s IBM and
| its approach towards personal computers.
| dpflan wrote:
| It is certainly strategic to make their AI the most accessible
| platform for building with AI. Plus the reach of their social
| networks can put AI improvements that are made elsewhere into
| their own models and then into their software and to end users.
| If company A finds a way to use Model X, then that is more
| easily usable by Meta -- they know the model quite well I would
| assume. Meta's business thrives on free usage by billions of
| users, it needs people to keep using its platform to survive,
| and not leave the networks. Maybe Google is the nearest
| competitor in terms of ads business being so financially vital.
| Havoc wrote:
| Must say I'm genuinely thankful for what Meta has done on this
| front. Without their research release of llama I think things
| would have been substantially less democratic.
|
| This could easily have gone into a "only orgs with billions can
| play" direction and nobody even trying in the learned
| helplessness sense. Instead we're ending up in a hybrid "ok maybe
| can't quite train from scratch but can still tinker" space which
| is a lot more healthy
|
| If they want to double down on that then I applaud them
| kibwen wrote:
| Wasn't Llama leaked, without Meta's consent?
| Havoc wrote:
| Nope wasn't leaked...somehow media latched on to that
| wording.
|
| Initially it was behind a consent form for research purposes.
| i.e. Just give some basic deets and you get access to the
| weights under a non-commercial license. FB shut that down
| after it got lots of attention.
|
| That obvious got copy pasted onto a torrent & grew legs from
| there. And FB hassled some people DCMA takedowns too but
| seemed pretty half hearted & was too late at that stage.
|
| [Sidequest: I believe the repo they used to distribute access
| also had a magnetic link in it too at one point which further
| confused the narrative but not 100% sure on the precise
| details on this]
|
| Point is at no stage was this 100% behind closed doors and
| someone leaked it as you & I would understand the word in the
| "stolen" sense.
| humanistbot wrote:
| Legally it is still restricted to those who have been
| granted permission for research / non-commercial purposes.
| That license still applies. The fact that they have stopped
| actively enforcing it does not change the legal status. If
| Elon were to announce that Twitter was using it for
| commercial purposes, they could sue in court and would
| likely win.
| bhickey wrote:
| It's unclear if model weights are protected by copyright
| in the US.
| fragmede wrote:
| Then breach of contract or trade secret.
| kernal wrote:
| >Nope wasn't leaked...somehow media latched on to that
| wording.
|
| Zuckerberg said it was during his Lex Fridman interview.
| edgyquant wrote:
| But as you just said... it was leaked
| Havoc wrote:
| If you want to consider filling in a form and downloading
| it a "leak" then yeah it was leaked. I wouldn't call it
| that but semantics I guess
| Uehreka wrote:
| I think people are referring to the part where someone
| made a torrent so you could get it without filling in the
| form as the leak.
| Havoc wrote:
| I see. Thanks for explaining. Yeah I guess that re-
| distribution was a little rogue and could perhaps be
| called a leak. I personally dislike that interpretation
| but I can see it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It was "leaked."
|
| They wanted to distribute it. But they couldn't,
| politically. So it "leaked."
| bick_nyers wrote:
| You can tell by Mark's wording and body language when he
| talks about it in the recent Lex Fridman episode. I got
| the impression from him that he would have released it in
| a manner closer to that of open source if there wasn't a
| question of legal liability.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Why couldn't they distribute it? They clearly could have.
| There's no law against it.
|
| Perhaps you meant that they were nervous about companies
| using it commercially and either bringing them bad press
| or making money off their work? That's clearly why they
| only released it for researchers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why couldn 't they distribute it?_
|
| No legal issues _per se_. Hence the political qualifier.
| See: https://www.menendez.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter
| _to_meta...
| [deleted]
| ren_engineer wrote:
| at best it's an example of "Commoditize your complements" by
| cutting OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google at the knees in their
| attempt to make much profit off AI -
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
|
| Facebook isn't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts,
| it just makes business sense for them to do it. AI seems to be
| in a smiling curve situation right now, where only Nvidia on
| the hardware side and the consumer facing products using AI as
| a feature are making money. The companies training the models
| and trying to sell the API seem like they'll have a hard time
| not being replaceable commodities
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_curve
| redbell wrote:
| > Facebook isn't doing this out of the kindness of their
| hearts
|
| Personally, I don't care if they had a plan to profit from
| this move as long as it brings value for the public, it's a
| win-win action.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Sure it is not benevolent. But fuck do I love them for it
| right now. It's better for all of us. And it took the game to
| a whole new level.
| el_nahual wrote:
| I don't think this is a case of "commoditize your
| complements." What's the complement to AI that meta owns?
|
| I think it's more of a case of "commoditize your
| _competitors_ ".
| moonchrome wrote:
| Zuckerberg talked about this in his interview with Lex
| Friedman.
|
| From what I understand they already benefited by the OSS
| work on quantization and they see themselves as well
| positioned to benefit from a world where there's a bunch of
| specialized AI models/assistants.
| fragmede wrote:
| So much of business is about people and connections, and
| hey, guess what Meta deals in? People and connections!
| humanistbot wrote:
| > What's the complement to AI that meta owns?
|
| - Platforms where users can interact with AI agents
|
| - Extensive user and content data that can be used to fine
| tune large foundation models
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Is this the beginning of a vilain redempion arc for Zuck?
| jack_pp wrote:
| Best to see him as a profit seeking robot/agent that can only
| be nudged by market forces and political pressure.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| No.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Meta has always been a big open source contributor. We use
| their prophet model for forecasting extensively.
|
| Their quality of open source has always been good for the
| things I've used.
| subarctic wrote:
| Looks like the original article is here[0], but it's behind a
| paywall
|
| [0]: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-wants-
| companies...
| miohtama wrote:
| It's not only free as in beer, but free as in libre, open source
| models.
|
| Let's hope it will play for AI is it played for operating systems
| with Linux.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _It 's not only free as in beer, but free as in libre_
|
| If by _it_ you mean LLaMA 1, then I don 't think per the
| license one can use it for commercial projects. So, it isn't
| really libre. That said, all indications are that LLaMA 2 would
| be fully FLOSS.
|
| If you meant OPT, it isn't _libre_ either:
| https://github.com/facebookresearch/metaseq/blob/main/projec...
| techwizrd wrote:
| Honestly, this is really wonderful news from Meta. I'm
| sufficiently impressed.
| alexcombessie wrote:
| I am not sure businesses would trust Meta with their sensitive
| data. Facebook/Meta brand equity in the B2B domain is severely
| tarnished, with their long history of lack of respect to data
| privacy laws and lack of transparency.
|
| I just don't see how Meta could possibly turn into a success in
| the B2B software business. They are a great advertising company,
| but they've never been successful in their other ventures...
| rvz wrote:
| Great move as Meta is also at the finish line in the race to zero
| and this indeed pressures both Google and OpenAI.com.
|
| If you are not at the finish line or in open source, you cannot
| win the race to zero.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Pretty clear they will open source as much as they can to kill
| off would be competitors.
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