LLAMA2 is out and it’s pretty fancy, and there’s a news report that they’re making a way bigger one. But if it’s just open source stuff, how do they justify the massive costs to make it? It seems like everyone can just use it for free.
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Facebook is crowdsourcing LLM platform development. If a leader emerges Facebook may buy them and thus directly monetise the crowdsourced efforts.
It’s the same thing Google does with Android and Chromium. Releasing it open source helps to keep the market competitive, and gives Meta free labor for maintaining and improving it. Later down the line, they can bundle it up with proprietary sauce to sell to businesses to make money.
It could be that they don’t make money on it. Really big corporations have the freedom to perform R&D without making a profit. Lexus sold their LFA at a loss, just to show their prowess. This could be them simply trying to improve their AI technology. That probably requires letting as many users interact with it as possible. They may not make money directly, but it’s still profitable in the long run.
They likely are making money though, either through ad revenue, or by collecting and selling user data. I assume you still need an account to use it.
If you played around with ChatGPT when it first came out, you might’ve noticed some hilariously incorrect answers like it very confidently claiming 3+4=17 or that there are no countries that start with the letter “V”. Since then it has gotten a lot better, and a big part of that is additional data that they can collect from users such as when they click whether the answer is good or not.
Both LLAMA and ChatGPT were incredibly expensive to train (several millions of dollars), but ChatGPT proved the proof-of-concept of the potential of large language models. So Meta is happy to release it for free in order to bring more awareness to their platform like others mentioned, and also to improve the product. Many people in the ML field have become more interested in LLMs, some of the potential issues with GPT or Bard, and the open-source nature would really bring in a lot of contributions.
No doubt they are hoping to incorporate this into their social media platforms and future technologies when it is ready, so it’s a form of investment.
They don’t. Or at least – they don’t make money directly from it. Releasing LLAMA as open source is their way to jump on the hype train. They don’t have good commercial products that could compete with GPT yet, so they want to, at least, prove they’re not far behind the competition. I’m sure that, at some point, they will release a commercial LLM that will compete with GPT.
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Open source cutting edge LLM => faster progress in the area of genAI => super-advanced genAI replaces “creators”/“influencers” with AI-generated content => Meta gets to keep all the ad revenue instead of sharing with people who make the content.
If you’re not buying the product, you are the product.
I’d imagine they’re learning based on user input to some degree. [Microsoft found this wasn’t a great idea though](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsLup7yy-6I).
If it’s free it’s either YOU are the product or they are Blitzscaling to later charge or at least be in the competition for the future of ai.
Meta sure it’s getting a ton of information from everyone using it. Data they can later use for a specific product or service.
I’m not certain if this is their strategy, but this is an obvious one:
First one to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) wins the world.
If we can come up with a problem-solving reason/act/observe AI that can solve any problem presented at a human level, that is called AGI. If you were talking to it via chat, it would be indistinguishable from a human with an internet connection, except faster. If you gave it a complex problem and gave it 2 days to run, you’d come back to find it has accomplished as much as a competent human would have in 6-8 days (because it never sleeps or takes a break). This is a world-altering technology. Imagine every task currently assigned to a human at a keyboard can now be automated.
If you’re the first one there and you can patent or close-source the secret sauce that makes it work, that’s a multi-trillion dollar asset you’ve built.
Then, you could instruct it to review its own code and make itself smarter, and in a few months it could possibly produce an ASI: Artificial Super Intelligence, an intelligence beyond human levels. This is an event known (controversially!) in tech circles as “the singularity”. If an AGI would put a huge number of humans out of work, an ASI could transform society and redefine what it means to be human. A couple of decades with an ASI and the projections start to sound crazy.
Spending a few billion now to get to AGI later, and maybe wind up with an ASI under your control is possibly the best investment in the history of the world.
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