Meta Wants Companies To Make Money Off Its Open-Source AI, in Challenge To Google (theinformation.com) 13
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his deputies want other companies to freely use and profit from new artificial intelligence software Meta is developing, a decision that could have big implications for other AI developers and businesses that are increasingly adopting it. The Information: Meta is working on ways to make the next version of its open-source large-language model -- technology that can power chatbots like ChatGPT -- available for commercial use, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation and a person who was briefed about it. The move could prompt a feeding frenzy among AI developers eager for alternatives to proprietary software sold by rivals Google and OpenAI. It would also indirectly benefit Meta's own AI development.
[...] Meta stands to gain from releasing open-source AI models. As developers adopt and improve those models or patch their security holes, Meta will be able to incorporate those improvements in AI models for its own consumer and advertising products, Zuckerberg said in an April call with stock analysts. For instance, Zuckerberg has said he wants small businesses and content creators that use Facebook's apps to have access to "AI agents" who can act on their behalf by automatically communicating with fans or customers. "LLaMA or the language model underlying this is basically going to be the engine that powers that," he said in an interview last week with podcaster Lex Fridman.
[...] Meta stands to gain from releasing open-source AI models. As developers adopt and improve those models or patch their security holes, Meta will be able to incorporate those improvements in AI models for its own consumer and advertising products, Zuckerberg said in an April call with stock analysts. For instance, Zuckerberg has said he wants small businesses and content creators that use Facebook's apps to have access to "AI agents" who can act on their behalf by automatically communicating with fans or customers. "LLaMA or the language model underlying this is basically going to be the engine that powers that," he said in an interview last week with podcaster Lex Fridman.
I see the benefit for Zuck, but (Score:5, Informative)
Facebook/Meta has repeatedly failed at everything it's tried to build itself, other than Facebook proper. Why would you expect their AI to be anything but a steaming pile?
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook/Meta has repeatedly failed at everything it's tried to build itself, other than Facebook proper. Why would you expect their AI to be anything but a steaming pile?
Why don't you check it out?
Re:I see the benefit for Zuck, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook/Meta has repeatedly failed at everything it's tried to build itself, other than Facebook proper. Why would you expect their AI to be anything but a steaming pile?
What's Google made outside of their search engine?
There's GMail and Google drive... and I think the rest of their hits are largely acquisition. They've got a good rep for R&D, but that hadn't really translated into secondary hit products.
Netflix has... well Netflix.
Amazon? Amazon and AWS.
Microsoft? Much bigger and more established. Windows, Office, XBox, and VSCode.
Apple? Famously innovative. Computers, iPods, iPhones, and Tablets (not sure Apple store brings in enough money to be a hit).
The tendency for everyone in the tech space to converge around single websites and products means that even for a very big and successful company it's hard to get a second major product line.
I suspect Facebook has the cash to hire enough PhDs and good devs to build something impressive, but given the mindshare that ChatGPT has already won it might not matter.
Re: (Score:2)
To be entirely honest, there are a lot of technologies built by Google, and used by the industry.
Protobuf / gRPC is pretty much the standard in large scale distributed systems.
Kubernetes as well. Almost all cloud deployments now use it.
TensorFlow is a *has been*, replaced by Facebook's PyTorch, but still it enabled ML when it was popular
Transformers (attention models, BERT) is the foundation for state of the art machine learning systems, including GPT (T is for Transformer).
Chrome's V8 was the first modern
Re: (Score:2)
To be entirely honest, there are a lot of technologies built by Google, and used by the industry.
[...]
Basically they have built very good *developer* products, and almost all of them are still supported.
(End user products are a different story).
100% agreed. But it's been a bit of a Bell Labs so far, outside of rep and PR I don't really it translating into a pile of new revenue for them.
That being said, when you have piles of extra cash then R&D and acquisitions really is the best place to pour it, but it still hasn't given them another stand out moneymaker.
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook/Meta has repeatedly failed at everything it's tried to build itself
Since we're on slashdot (news for nerds, stuff that matters), these are the first two coding successes that come to mind...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
When I was a kid, my parents warned me (Score:4, Informative)
never accept a ride from creepy men.
They also told me when it's free, you won't like the real price when it's time to pay up.
Re: (Score:2)
It's already done (Score:2)
If they have an open source model, and released code / documentation to go with it for inference and training, they already did everything necessary for companies to make money off of it. They don't need to do anything else.
Wage (Score:1)