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Mark Zuckerberg talks about this in their Q1 earnings call. "I think that there's an important distinction between the products we offer and a lot of the techn
by radq 3y ago
Mark Zuckerberg talks about this in their Q1 earnings call.
"I think that there's an important distinction between the products we offer and a lot of the technical infrastructure, especially the software that we -- that we write to support that. And historically, whether it's the Open Compute project that we've done or just open sourcing a lot of the infrastructure that we've built, we've historically open sourced a lot of that infrastructure, even though the products themselves are obviously were not -- we haven’t open sourced the code for our core products or anything like that.
And the reason why I think why we do this is that unlike some of the other companies in the space, we're not selling a cloud computing service where we try to keep the different software infrastructure that we're building proprietary. For us, it's way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we're using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make and others’ use of those tools can, in some cases like Open Compute, drive down the costs of those things which make our business more efficient too.
So I think to some degree we're just playing a different game on the infrastructure than companies like Google or Microsoft or Amazon, and that creates different incentives for us. So overall, I think that that's going to lead us to do more work in terms of open sourcing, some of the lower level models and tools.
But of course, a lot of the product work itself is going to be specific and integrated with the things that we do. So it's not that everything we do is going to be open. Obviously, a bunch of this needs to be developed in a way that creates unique value for our products, but I think in terms of the basic models, I would expect us to be pushing and helping to build out an open ecosystem here, which I think is something that's going to be important."
- contrarian1234 3y ago"we can benefit from the improvements that others make and others’ use of those tools can" I have always had the impression that maintaining an open source project is way more work than you get back from "the community" of users. Is this not true? Are for instance the internal facebook react users benefiting a huge amount from what outside contributes have built on top of react? I think an unspoken dimension is that kneecaping the other big tech companies' entrenchments and denying them a market is always good for them - esp when as they point out, it doesn't actually hurt any of their own business interests. Other faang are always a future threat. Hurting them is always a good business move
- 0xB31B1B 3y agoBroad use helps uncover bugs and make the software more resilient and reliable. They don’t fix all the bugs, and they don’t build features the community wants for the sake of it, but having users of your tools is a benefit.
- liamwire 3y agoNot only that, but also increases the talent pool you can hire from that has familiarity with your internal tooling from the start.
- snovv_crash 3y agoYou get less input from the community than what you put in, but you also get different input than you would get from in-house devs who are all in the same bubble.
- pawelmurias 3y ago> I have always had the impression that maintaining an open source project is way more work than you get back from "the community" of users You get a ton of valuable work back from quality contributors. There is a vocal minority of people complaining that they feel burned out because of contributions but attracking some high quality contributors can help a lot. Pretraining new hires is valuable and the new hires will also train on the open source project docs.
- johnpublic 3y agoBasically: "commoditise your complement " applied to Facebook, means they want to comoditise the foundational tech like AI. And open source is the route to that.
- aunty_helen 3y agoMS put a cool 10b into OpenAI thinking they would have a massive tech moat. FB leaks llama and now OpenAI only has it's status as the bitcoin of LLMs (first, biggest, incumbent) FB's plan is to F everyone else (MAAG) by making sure they can't make billions off tech that FB have sitting on the shelf, yet is extremely expensive for a true startup competitor to get in on.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIt's noncommercial only though, right? So people can't spin it up and start using it in the work?
- papruapap 3y agoNo directly but people can take it as "inspiration" to create new ones.
- mx20 3y agoThe software got rewritten already and the model weights are probably not protecttable. Especially if you use the model weights to train your own model. Why would you be allowed to use copyrighted data to train your Models but not other Models?
- dpflan 3y ago"For us, it's way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we're using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make and others’ use of those tools can, in some cases like Open Compute, drive down the costs of those things which make our business more efficient too." -- isn't this the Web 2.0 mantra applied to software?
- iosjunkie 3y agoThis is the OSS model that been around for 30 years. Operating systems, web servers, countless other projects that help build the internet we know today. Now, AI tools from Meta.