4 ms·

Even though I tend to agree with these, I feel uneasy about them being stated as facts. There could be more mundane _intended_ reasons for doing research, such

by smokel 3y ago

Even though I tend to agree with these, I feel uneasy about them being stated as facts. There could be more mundane _intended_ reasons for doing research, such as working on a VR program, as mentioned in a sibling comment. Some people believe that upper management of these companies are brilliant masterminds who play chess with the world, but, personally, I highly doubt that such a thing is even possible.

gmerc 3y ago
I worked there (no specific insights into the situation though), I have no such illusions of brilliant leadership but at the same time, if this course of action seems the logical move for me, so it will be to any number of other people. I don’t think these were long term planned moves, more pivots to react to a rapidly changing external environment that required decisive action and were made from a limited palette of options. It requires only one of these benefits to be the goal as well, the rest is cherry on top - Stability for example did a similar move (give it away) when faced with the funding environment and a much deeper funded opponent and in general it worked out well for them and made what happened with LLama a predictable option with several positive effects (investor virtue signaling on AI, open source contributions, avoidance of negative externalities since they “leaked” the model rather than operating it ) Ultimately though, these are real effects - the reasons why the actions were taken may control the framing (brilliant strategists vs accident genius vs desperate cornered CEO), I am not sure that framing matters all that much.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > Ultimately though, these are real effects - the reasons why the actions were taken may control the framing (brilliant strategists vs accident genius vs desperate cornered CEO), I am not sure that framing matters all that much. Seems to me the state of mind of leadership is pretty crucial in knowing what the future of these models will be. If the strategy is to release interesting-but-not-business-relevant R&D results as a reputation-building/recruiting tool, we might expect other models in the future, but no big effort to maintain models after release, and models that make a big competitive advantage to be kept secret. If the high level strategy is to enable ML content creation so you can sell ads alongside it, we might expect Facebook to adopt friendly policies towards such content. If the strategy is to gain investor confidence about the future of the company, we might think after their reputation is established, flashy demos of closed models will serve just as well as open models. If the strategy is to mess up Google's revenue streams with for no particular benefit to Meta, it's hard to know what else we'd expect - or if peace could break out and their strategy might change completely.

by smokel 3y ago

gmerc 3y ago

I worked there (no specific insights into the situation though), I have no such illusions of brilliant leadership but at the same time, if this course of action seems the logical move for me, so it will be to any number of other people. I don’t think these were long term planned moves, more pivots to react to a rapidly changing external environment that required decisive action and were made from a limited palette of options. It requires only one of these benefits to be the goal as well, the rest is cherry on top - Stability for example did a similar move (give it away) when faced with the funding environment and a much deeper funded opponent and in general it worked out well for them and made what happened with LLama a predictable option with several positive effects (investor virtue signaling on AI, open source contributions, avoidance of negative externalities since they “leaked” the model rather than operating it ) Ultimately though, these are real effects - the reasons why the actions were taken may control the framing (brilliant strategists vs accident genius vs desperate cornered CEO), I am not sure that framing matters all that much.

michaelt 3y ago
> Ultimately though, these are real effects - the reasons why the actions were taken may control the framing (brilliant strategists vs accident genius vs desperate cornered CEO), I am not sure that framing matters all that much. Seems to me the state of mind of leadership is pretty crucial in knowing what the future of these models will be. If the strategy is to release interesting-but-not-business-relevant R&D results as a reputation-building/recruiting tool, we might expect other models in the future, but no big effort to maintain models after release, and models that make a big competitive advantage to be kept secret. If the high level strategy is to enable ML content creation so you can sell ads alongside it, we might expect Facebook to adopt friendly policies towards such content. If the strategy is to gain investor confidence about the future of the company, we might think after their reputation is established, flashy demos of closed models will serve just as well as open models. If the strategy is to mess up Google's revenue streams with for no particular benefit to Meta, it's hard to know what else we'd expect - or if peace could break out and their strategy might change completely.