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Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? I still don’t understand why their research division exists and how it relates to the

Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? I still don’t understand why their research division exists and how it relates to their core business. I’m a huge admirer of their work but don’t understand the why.

BoorishBears 3y ago
Commoditizing your compliment (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/) Meta runs on UGC (User Generated Content), so making it easy and cheap to make great content is in their best interests. If they can reduce the cost of making a Billboard 100 quality song to $0, or make it so anyone with a 1.3MP webcam can use AI to get MKBHD level quality streams going, they: - increase the amount of content being generated - increase the quality of that content - make the content cheaper to acquire/license (since there's dramatically more supply)
- marcopicentini 3y ago
  I understand but Code LLama or CoTracker do not create content for Facebook/Instagram. Moreover, AI-generated content is not so engageable as a human-generated content. I don't think the purpose is to have more content at lower price. The theory makes sense, but it's not clear what its complement is?
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    > AI-generated content is not so engageable as a human-generated content Just wait until social media companies start to train transformers on engagement metrics.
bg24 3y ago
My hypothesis is that they want to get the absolute mindshare and adoption and decide the right product/solutions along the way. Note that there are trends (web 1, web 2, mobile etc.) and the leaders tend to grow significantly. It is a mad rush time with the new generation of AI, and future products are going to be amazing. Meta cannot afford to have just 1 cash cow. Metaverse failed, but they have a real shot here. A few things I can think of (beyond social networks). - Enterprise push, starting with very high-end enterprises. Their license structure (free below X million users) allows it nicely. They can afford to have a small team and yet win big. Note that typically 80% of any enterprise products revenue comes from say, 10-20% of top customers. - Build a platform. Meta learned from Google, and then Apple debacle on how dependent the world is on platform. What would the new OS look like? - Weaken Google and Apple. Some indications on why they partnered with Microsoft - this also ties to the point above.
- patapong 3y ago
  I believe attracting AI talent could also be an important motivation. Many AI researchers may appreciate the open nature of their work, and having world-class AI researchers could be very important strategically for Meta.
eloisius 3y ago
Tracking is a core competency for VR headsets. It could also be used for AI-assisted video production, which is the bread and butter of their advertising platform. Users generate videos, and with more powerful editing tools they can churn out more interesting content than TikTok.
- eurekin 3y ago
  Are those kinds of algorithms used in VR eye tracking systems?
  - eloisius 3y ago
    Eye tracking, probably not, but localizing the VR headset in space without needing an expensive rig in your living room is cool. Or perhaps even being able to build a 3D reconstruction of your living room, localize yourself within it, send the reconstruction to your grandma and let her join you in your own living room.
basch 3y ago
My guess is to 1) stunt the growth potential of their competitors (google, microsoft) before they acquire some sort of generational lead that forces everyone onto their platforms and 2) reset a level playing field for a new generation of startups to someday acquire, that are built on THEIR way of doing things.
smcleod 3y ago
Trying to regain some relevance in a world that has largely moved on from caring about it's core product and the added flop of the 'metaverse'. Without doing things like this they won't be able to compete with the large number of AI/ML startups in hiring space either. It's a big PR bump, can you even remember the last time someone said something positive about that company? For me I think it would be easily more than 10 years ago.
WanderPanda 3y ago
I think it is largely driven by LeCun, he has the Bell labs DNA
jack_pp 3y ago
Watch Caprica (Battlestar Galactica prequel)
hx8 3y ago
* Meta's products are generally higher tech than people give them credit for. They have a lot invested in having great image and video tech. * At the scale Meta is at, and at the margins they can operate at, R&D is a valid use funds. Apple has revenue at ~80B/yr. Microsoft have revenue of ~60B/yr. Meta has revenue at ~30B/yr. No one raises an eyebrow when Microsoft announces some go-no-where R&D project. * I think there might be a Meta bias towards anything with the word "tracking" in it.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  I think you meant mean these revenue numbers are per quarter, not per year.
bagels 3y ago
At the very least, think about how this can be used for features in Instagram. I can't talk about specifics, but there are real applications in existing products.
redox99 3y ago
Aside from all the points mentioned by the other comments, there's also the factor that Zuck probably finds this kind of research cool, and considering he owns the majority of the votes, he can do almost whatever he wants with Meta.
TX81Z 3y ago
While they can’t leapfrog Google or OpenAI, they can introduce a nearly unlimited number of competitors and new entrants to the market. All of whom will be aligned to building on this foundation. Either you claim the ring for yourself or you destroy it.
- rvz 3y ago
  Well they managed to convince the Deep Learning ecosystem to move from using Tensorflow and to instead use PyTorch. So there's that. But again Meta's involvement in AI can't be ignored > they can introduce a nearly unlimited number of competitors and new entrants to the market. All of whom will be aligned to building on this foundation. Exactly this. They are creating an ecosystem around PyTorch with the best models being available there.
alexgartrell 3y ago
> Mark Zuckerberg justified the move in a Facebook post: “Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues.” [0] I don't work in the space so I can't comment much, but my team (Server Operating Systems and similar) has been working with Linux, Systemd, Centos, etc for years for essentially the same reason. Working with the community forces you to build better stuff, because, in a healthy community, no one cares that a "Director from Meta wants it" which is the kind of thing that kills proprietary projects in the cradle all the time. [0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23817060/meta-open-source-ai-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-llama2 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23817060/meta-open-source...
- victor106 3y ago
  I don’t use any of meta’s products but i must say Meta and Mark Z’d support for open source is commendable. They’ve released and supported some excellent open source models and frameworks
a_bonobo 3y ago
I remember a blog post on HN from an ex-DeepMind/Google Brain person who postulated that the research group existed for visibility; you use the research to attract talent who sees the cool stuff you work on and gets excited, but once hired funnel that talent elsewhere in the company to attract clicks or generate money. Research as advertising.
squokko 3y ago
Meta has one of the largest supplies of proprietary data in the world (along with Microsoft and Apple). Big improvements in the world's ability to analyze data benefits them tremendously. If they're able to, for example, identify objects in videos and what's happening with them, they can make better inferences about the content of the videos, which lets them make better recommendations, causing people to watch more videos on FB/Instagram and giving them more ad revenue. Publishing their models doesn't really enable any of their competitors (TikTok is their only real competitor at all), and being a leader in the community and getting top talent to work on these models benefits them.
gmerc 3y ago
- It degrades Googles and OpenAis ability to monetize. That alone is worth gold because tech is not a blue ocean anymore - neither from a market opportunity nor from an investor perspective. Your competitors loss is your gain. They can’t use money they don’t make to mount attacks to dislodge customers, investors, mindshare from you. Yes, Meta is weaponizing "open" to hurt their competitors, but we're in a capitalism world, that's about as good as it gets unless you want purity of motives. - Secondly it commoditizes AI. Zuck believes that his platforms ultimately will benefit if there is more content. Because his platforms sell the ability to show YOUR content over the rest, for coin. Just as with news/mobile games, driving the value of your content lower and lower by fostering the creation/supply of more of it is good for FB and bad for you. You have to advertise to rise above the noise. (See commoditize your complements) - Thirdly it reinforces the investor narrative that the company has a future because AI. That's important, because by now consensus is that ads future is under pressure of market saturation, regulation, competition (Apple's ability to hurt Meta at will, Amazon's increasing ads monetisation, etc.). There's more than one company that needs that narrative to land, but combined with hurting google, this is pretty good for a company that didn't have a generative AI strategy and was betting on the metaverse a year ago. - Fourth, it captures open source momentum behind your limited internal efforts. Llama, when it was first released, was not competitive - easily a year behind Google's and more behind OpenAI's efforts - but by being first to capture thousands of capable contributors, just a few months later it is one of the most efficient and scalable LLM systems out there and incorporating many innovations days after their paper releases. Open models alone, without their foundational model, would have tugged along for a while before reaching this state. What's fascinating about this situation is how it shuffles the big tech positioning. Meta and Apple, purely on a personal leadership bases, are hating each other's guts, but both Apple and Meta need Google/OpenAI to fail, for different reasons
- nologic01 3y ago
  Maybe it is just Zuck trying to atone himself for the damage he brought to the world. Open source AI (as in various ML/AI models developed and inferring in people's own devices) is a game changer with ramifications that are still hard to discern. E.g., what does "user content" mean anymore when you can interpolate and extrapolate from any publicly available bit of information to create infinite "near replicas"? Rationally, in such an uncertain future where the technical, legal and social boundaries and guardrails are not even sketched yet what makes sense is to keep near the ring but not in it (no need to receive random punches given you are already the designated punchbag) and above all: keep fit.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
One way to look at it is it actually prevents competitors from making money. You release something for free - other companies that could have released it as a product no longer have a business. It’s no different from the approach of trying to hire all the top tech talent. You deprive your competitors of resource.
specproc 3y ago
Whilst I generally agree with the consensus in this thread that they're trying to starve competitors of cash, I'm not particularly bullish about Meta's future. They've sunk an obscene amount of cash into a failed product (the Metaverse), and their core business -- advertising -- is under threat from increased competition and falling engagement with their main platforms. Is Threads winning? I don't think Threads is winning, or that it will. To me this feels like a big ship's going down, and all the glorious loot is being thrown off to shed weight, and it's floating ashore on our island.
- kredd 3y ago
  It’s weird, I want to say the same, but then realize everyone I know is using some sort of FB product. Facebook for local groups and marketplace, Instagram for messaging/posting, Whatsapp is ubiquitous outside of USA. Regarding Threads, I’m also not sure. I don’t think it’s being used widely, but that’s how Reels started as well. Everyone wrote it off as TikTok clone, but now I get to see people use it while I’m on public transport in different parts of the world. Agreed about the Metaverse part though. Oculus is still one of the things you try out for a couple of hours, and then forget about it.
  - blackkettle 3y ago
    How does whatsapp make revenue? I've used it for years. I don't pay for it, I never see ads in it. They claim it is 'secure' and my conversation data isn't used for anything. Even if the last is untrue; and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if it was, is simply mining those conversations sufficient to generate the revenue to pay for server costs? How does it work? Edit: Business APIs and payment fees is apparently the answer. I'm genuinely impressed I've been able to use it all these years for free without ever having a hint of this.
    - emanuele232 3y ago
      for what i recall, the actual messages on whatsapp are end-to-end encrypted, metadata and attachments are not. It is just another mass data gathering service
Gijs4g 3y ago
While 'commoditizing your complements' is one of their strategies. I think it also helps them attract top-tier talent, as who doesn't want the whole world to see and use your cutting-edge developments.
londons_explore 3y ago
Many blue-sky research divisions end up not costing as much as you'd imagine. Patent licensing, the defence value of a big patent portfolio, the occasional 'demo' which turns out to be a huge success and you're best placed to turn into a commercial product in a new field, etc.
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
Can't speak to the overall AI Labs model reasearch but this pixel tracking is directly tied to computer vision and what they are doing at Reality Labs advancing Mixed Reality passthrough with geometry mapping of your surroundings and hand based gesture controls. There is a lot of computer vision baked into those chips and while this is published I am sure they have productized it using more advanced proprietary methods under patent.
fsloth 3y ago
Industrial history is full of freewheeling corporate research departments inventing the future for the benefit of all stakeholders. And of dangerous examples what happens when you either 1) lack this innovative capacity or 2) lack the foresight or courage to leverage the new technology. As a ginormous company, given the historical trends, Meta would be rather poorly positioned if it didn't have a research wing. We can view this also from the point of view how the resources are used for the benefit of innovation. Some companies have a distributed innovation budget (ie. 3M:s 15% time for all). A research department composing 15% of Meta:s personnel costs would be rather huge (I have no numbers what the actual cost is). So having a dedicated research function can be also viewed as a rather cost effective way to stay ahead of the curve if benchmarked in this context.
ww520 3y ago
It’s a new framework, a new language, and a platform. It’s like open sourcing React, opening Java, or opening the web browser. Controlling the platform has tremendous benefits despite giving it out for free.
sangnoir 3y ago
> Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? Pixel tracking is pretty foundational to Augmented Reality: you can calculate objects' position, orientation and speed - it is obvious to me why Meta would do this research, and seed the models to the wider world who can dream up applications for it (in both sense of the word). When you consider other research projects Meta released (image segmentation, digital twins, etc), the AR/VR play becomes a little more obvious. I can't wait until someone integrates these tracking models with Blender, as a non-expert in object-tracking - this appears to be superior to the tracking pipeline that was available in Blender a few years ago when I looked into it. The fantastic thing about open source is that the project can be used in ways the author never considered.

BoorishBears 3y ago

Commoditizing your compliment (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/) Meta runs on UGC (User Generated Content), so making it easy and cheap to make great content is in their best interests. If they can reduce the cost of making a Billboard 100 quality song to $0, or make it so anyone with a 1.3MP webcam can use AI to get MKBHD level quality streams going, they: - increase the amount of content being generated - increase the quality of that content - make the content cheaper to acquire/license (since there's dramatically more supply)

marcopicentini 3y ago
I understand but Code LLama or CoTracker do not create content for Facebook/Instagram. Moreover, AI-generated content is not so engageable as a human-generated content. I don't think the purpose is to have more content at lower price. The theory makes sense, but it's not clear what its complement is?
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  > AI-generated content is not so engageable as a human-generated content Just wait until social media companies start to train transformers on engagement metrics.

bg24 3y ago

My hypothesis is that they want to get the absolute mindshare and adoption and decide the right product/solutions along the way. Note that there are trends (web 1, web 2, mobile etc.) and the leaders tend to grow significantly. It is a mad rush time with the new generation of AI, and future products are going to be amazing. Meta cannot afford to have just 1 cash cow. Metaverse failed, but they have a real shot here. A few things I can think of (beyond social networks). - Enterprise push, starting with very high-end enterprises. Their license structure (free below X million users) allows it nicely. They can afford to have a small team and yet win big. Note that typically 80% of any enterprise products revenue comes from say, 10-20% of top customers. - Build a platform. Meta learned from Google, and then Apple debacle on how dependent the world is on platform. What would the new OS look like? - Weaken Google and Apple. Some indications on why they partnered with Microsoft - this also ties to the point above.

patapong 3y ago
I believe attracting AI talent could also be an important motivation. Many AI researchers may appreciate the open nature of their work, and having world-class AI researchers could be very important strategically for Meta.

eloisius 3y ago

Tracking is a core competency for VR headsets. It could also be used for AI-assisted video production, which is the bread and butter of their advertising platform. Users generate videos, and with more powerful editing tools they can churn out more interesting content than TikTok.

eurekin 3y ago
Are those kinds of algorithms used in VR eye tracking systems?
- eloisius 3y ago
  Eye tracking, probably not, but localizing the VR headset in space without needing an expensive rig in your living room is cool. Or perhaps even being able to build a 3D reconstruction of your living room, localize yourself within it, send the reconstruction to your grandma and let her join you in your own living room.

basch 3y ago

My guess is to 1) stunt the growth potential of their competitors (google, microsoft) before they acquire some sort of generational lead that forces everyone onto their platforms and 2) reset a level playing field for a new generation of startups to someday acquire, that are built on THEIR way of doing things.

smcleod 3y ago

Trying to regain some relevance in a world that has largely moved on from caring about it's core product and the added flop of the 'metaverse'. Without doing things like this they won't be able to compete with the large number of AI/ML startups in hiring space either. It's a big PR bump, can you even remember the last time someone said something positive about that company? For me I think it would be easily more than 10 years ago.

WanderPanda 3y ago

I think it is largely driven by LeCun, he has the Bell labs DNA

jack_pp 3y ago

Watch Caprica (Battlestar Galactica prequel)

hx8 3y ago

* Meta's products are generally higher tech than people give them credit for. They have a lot invested in having great image and video tech. * At the scale Meta is at, and at the margins they can operate at, R&D is a valid use funds. Apple has revenue at ~80B/yr. Microsoft have revenue of ~60B/yr. Meta has revenue at ~30B/yr. No one raises an eyebrow when Microsoft announces some go-no-where R&D project. * I think there might be a Meta bias towards anything with the word "tracking" in it.

edmundsauto 3y ago
I think you meant mean these revenue numbers are per quarter, not per year.

bagels 3y ago

At the very least, think about how this can be used for features in Instagram. I can't talk about specifics, but there are real applications in existing products.

redox99 3y ago

Aside from all the points mentioned by the other comments, there's also the factor that Zuck probably finds this kind of research cool, and considering he owns the majority of the votes, he can do almost whatever he wants with Meta.

TX81Z 3y ago

While they can’t leapfrog Google or OpenAI, they can introduce a nearly unlimited number of competitors and new entrants to the market. All of whom will be aligned to building on this foundation. Either you claim the ring for yourself or you destroy it.

rvz 3y ago
Well they managed to convince the Deep Learning ecosystem to move from using Tensorflow and to instead use PyTorch. So there's that. But again Meta's involvement in AI can't be ignored > they can introduce a nearly unlimited number of competitors and new entrants to the market. All of whom will be aligned to building on this foundation. Exactly this. They are creating an ecosystem around PyTorch with the best models being available there.

alexgartrell 3y ago

> Mark Zuckerberg justified the move in a Facebook post: “Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues.” [0] I don't work in the space so I can't comment much, but my team (Server Operating Systems and similar) has been working with Linux, Systemd, Centos, etc for years for essentially the same reason. Working with the community forces you to build better stuff, because, in a healthy community, no one cares that a "Director from Meta wants it" which is the kind of thing that kills proprietary projects in the cradle all the time. [0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23817060/meta-open-source-ai-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-llama2 https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23817060/meta-open-source...

victor106 3y ago
I don’t use any of meta’s products but i must say Meta and Mark Z’d support for open source is commendable. They’ve released and supported some excellent open source models and frameworks

a_bonobo 3y ago

I remember a blog post on HN from an ex-DeepMind/Google Brain person who postulated that the research group existed for visibility; you use the research to attract talent who sees the cool stuff you work on and gets excited, but once hired funnel that talent elsewhere in the company to attract clicks or generate money. Research as advertising.

squokko 3y ago

Meta has one of the largest supplies of proprietary data in the world (along with Microsoft and Apple). Big improvements in the world's ability to analyze data benefits them tremendously. If they're able to, for example, identify objects in videos and what's happening with them, they can make better inferences about the content of the videos, which lets them make better recommendations, causing people to watch more videos on FB/Instagram and giving them more ad revenue. Publishing their models doesn't really enable any of their competitors (TikTok is their only real competitor at all), and being a leader in the community and getting top talent to work on these models benefits them.

gmerc 3y ago

- It degrades Googles and OpenAis ability to monetize. That alone is worth gold because tech is not a blue ocean anymore - neither from a market opportunity nor from an investor perspective. Your competitors loss is your gain. They can’t use money they don’t make to mount attacks to dislodge customers, investors, mindshare from you. Yes, Meta is weaponizing "open" to hurt their competitors, but we're in a capitalism world, that's about as good as it gets unless you want purity of motives. - Secondly it commoditizes AI. Zuck believes that his platforms ultimately will benefit if there is more content. Because his platforms sell the ability to show YOUR content over the rest, for coin. Just as with news/mobile games, driving the value of your content lower and lower by fostering the creation/supply of more of it is good for FB and bad for you. You have to advertise to rise above the noise. (See commoditize your complements) - Thirdly it reinforces the investor narrative that the company has a future because AI. That's important, because by now consensus is that ads future is under pressure of market saturation, regulation, competition (Apple's ability to hurt Meta at will, Amazon's increasing ads monetisation, etc.). There's more than one company that needs that narrative to land, but combined with hurting google, this is pretty good for a company that didn't have a generative AI strategy and was betting on the metaverse a year ago. - Fourth, it captures open source momentum behind your limited internal efforts. Llama, when it was first released, was not competitive - easily a year behind Google's and more behind OpenAI's efforts - but by being first to capture thousands of capable contributors, just a few months later it is one of the most efficient and scalable LLM systems out there and incorporating many innovations days after their paper releases. Open models alone, without their foundational model, would have tugged along for a while before reaching this state. What's fascinating about this situation is how it shuffles the big tech positioning. Meta and Apple, purely on a personal leadership bases, are hating each other's guts, but both Apple and Meta need Google/OpenAI to fail, for different reasons

nologic01 3y ago
Maybe it is just Zuck trying to atone himself for the damage he brought to the world. Open source AI (as in various ML/AI models developed and inferring in people's own devices) is a game changer with ramifications that are still hard to discern. E.g., what does "user content" mean anymore when you can interpolate and extrapolate from any publicly available bit of information to create infinite "near replicas"? Rationally, in such an uncertain future where the technical, legal and social boundaries and guardrails are not even sketched yet what makes sense is to keep near the ring but not in it (no need to receive random punches given you are already the designated punchbag) and above all: keep fit.

iamflimflam1 3y ago

One way to look at it is it actually prevents competitors from making money. You release something for free - other companies that could have released it as a product no longer have a business. It’s no different from the approach of trying to hire all the top tech talent. You deprive your competitors of resource.

specproc 3y ago

Whilst I generally agree with the consensus in this thread that they're trying to starve competitors of cash, I'm not particularly bullish about Meta's future. They've sunk an obscene amount of cash into a failed product (the Metaverse), and their core business -- advertising -- is under threat from increased competition and falling engagement with their main platforms. Is Threads winning? I don't think Threads is winning, or that it will. To me this feels like a big ship's going down, and all the glorious loot is being thrown off to shed weight, and it's floating ashore on our island.

kredd 3y ago
It’s weird, I want to say the same, but then realize everyone I know is using some sort of FB product. Facebook for local groups and marketplace, Instagram for messaging/posting, Whatsapp is ubiquitous outside of USA. Regarding Threads, I’m also not sure. I don’t think it’s being used widely, but that’s how Reels started as well. Everyone wrote it off as TikTok clone, but now I get to see people use it while I’m on public transport in different parts of the world. Agreed about the Metaverse part though. Oculus is still one of the things you try out for a couple of hours, and then forget about it.
- blackkettle 3y ago
  How does whatsapp make revenue? I've used it for years. I don't pay for it, I never see ads in it. They claim it is 'secure' and my conversation data isn't used for anything. Even if the last is untrue; and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if it was, is simply mining those conversations sufficient to generate the revenue to pay for server costs? How does it work? Edit: Business APIs and payment fees is apparently the answer. I'm genuinely impressed I've been able to use it all these years for free without ever having a hint of this.
  - emanuele232 3y ago
    for what i recall, the actual messages on whatsapp are end-to-end encrypted, metadata and attachments are not. It is just another mass data gathering service

Gijs4g 3y ago

While 'commoditizing your complements' is one of their strategies. I think it also helps them attract top-tier talent, as who doesn't want the whole world to see and use your cutting-edge developments.

londons_explore 3y ago

Many blue-sky research divisions end up not costing as much as you'd imagine. Patent licensing, the defence value of a big patent portfolio, the occasional 'demo' which turns out to be a huge success and you're best placed to turn into a commercial product in a new field, etc.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

Can't speak to the overall AI Labs model reasearch but this pixel tracking is directly tied to computer vision and what they are doing at Reality Labs advancing Mixed Reality passthrough with geometry mapping of your surroundings and hand based gesture controls. There is a lot of computer vision baked into those chips and while this is published I am sure they have productized it using more advanced proprietary methods under patent.

fsloth 3y ago

Industrial history is full of freewheeling corporate research departments inventing the future for the benefit of all stakeholders. And of dangerous examples what happens when you either 1) lack this innovative capacity or 2) lack the foresight or courage to leverage the new technology. As a ginormous company, given the historical trends, Meta would be rather poorly positioned if it didn't have a research wing. We can view this also from the point of view how the resources are used for the benefit of innovation. Some companies have a distributed innovation budget (ie. 3M:s 15% time for all). A research department composing 15% of Meta:s personnel costs would be rather huge (I have no numbers what the actual cost is). So having a dedicated research function can be also viewed as a rather cost effective way to stay ahead of the curve if benchmarked in this context.

ww520 3y ago

It’s a new framework, a new language, and a platform. It’s like open sourcing React, opening Java, or opening the web browser. Controlling the platform has tremendous benefits despite giving it out for free.

sangnoir 3y ago

> Does anyone understand the business angle for meta here with these models? Pixel tracking is pretty foundational to Augmented Reality: you can calculate objects' position, orientation and speed - it is obvious to me why Meta would do this research, and seed the models to the wider world who can dream up applications for it (in both sense of the word). When you consider other research projects Meta released (image segmentation, digital twins, etc), the AR/VR play becomes a little more obvious. I can't wait until someone integrates these tracking models with Blender, as a non-expert in object-tracking - this appears to be superior to the tracking pipeline that was available in Blender a few years ago when I looked into it. The fantastic thing about open source is that the project can be used in ways the author never considered.