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Does anyone know why Meta is open srcing Llama? The 2 explanations I have heard are "commoditize the complement" and "take advantage of public improvements of L

Does anyone know why Meta is open srcing Llama? The 2 explanations I have heard are "commoditize the complement" and "take advantage of public improvements of Llama". I have always found concepts such as "commoditize the complement" very interesting. For some reason, they seem like pseudo explanations of behaviours we see from companies. I am not entirely convinced that this was Meta's reasoning for releasing Llama. Like, I think Zuck is not thinking along these lines while open srcing LLMs. How is Llama a complement of Meta's products? Meta wants more social interaction. It's a big stretch to assume LLMs will lead to more shareable social content (unless meta wants AI bots, in which case they don't need LLMs; they can just relax their moderation policies). I honestly still don't have any good explanations for releasing Llama. Even the explanation of Meta gaining value from public improvements to Llama seems too vague and a stretch. Meta has enough engineers to make the most useful improvements themselves. The cost and effort of open srcing Llama is >> the value Meta gains from public improvements of Llama. So, yeah this is still an open ques for me...

fragmede 3y ago
One possibility is that they'll launch a hosted version of Llama-4 whenever they come out with that, and think the branding from Llama will help them sell that future version.
wrsh07 3y ago
I strongly endorse the commodify complement hypothesis, but here are others: 1. The only one that matters - the controlling founder wants to 2. It's great marketing. Make Facebook engineering (which is talented) seem cool. Also let their talented engineering teams flex their muscles a bit. 3. Investing in GPUs is a decent hedge in case there is something world changing coming (imagine Instagram reels but 50% of the content is ai generated. Or maybe just all ads are). Remember mobile - a previous paradigm shift - was an existential threat for Facebook 4. This is inline with the complement hypothesis, but what are you going to do with text you generate with llama? Some of that content will go right back on Facebook or one of their many platforms 5. WhatsApp business is a thing, and Facebook is talented enough at engineering that they can mimic any cool chat bot tools people build and integrate them into that 6. It's free for them (what are the downsides?) and reputationally gives them a certain kind of moral high ground compared to Google or OpenAI 7. Oh, the publicity will sell users on accessing the llama API hosted on Google (which pays Facebook money) What are the downsides? Like seriously!
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Additionally, this is not an overnight decision for Facebook/Meta. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that this is a snap decision by them, but Facebook's AI research labs outdate and outspend most of FAANG's. Their only real competitor is Google, who practically rolled over dead once GGML/Pytorch cemented itself as the cutting-edge. It's very possible that Llama had been ready for months, and Meta was internally unsure how to roll it out.
grey8 3y ago
There is a podcast episode of Lex Fridman talking with Mark Zuckerberg, and in this episode Mark states that the reason Llama is (and will stay) open source is that that is the deal that Meta has with the engineers. To get top engineers, there had to be some agreement, and this agreement apparently is that the engineers want their work open sourced. Pretty cool, IMHO.
- easygenes 3y ago
  When Llama first released in Feb Yann tweeted that they were committed to releasing all models under GPL, and yet that’s not the license we all got. There’s been a move to more permissive licensing since. So it’s been a bit of a tug of war still.

fragmede 3y ago

One possibility is that they'll launch a hosted version of Llama-4 whenever they come out with that, and think the branding from Llama will help them sell that future version.

wrsh07 3y ago

I strongly endorse the commodify complement hypothesis, but here are others: 1. The only one that matters - the controlling founder wants to 2. It's great marketing. Make Facebook engineering (which is talented) seem cool. Also let their talented engineering teams flex their muscles a bit. 3. Investing in GPUs is a decent hedge in case there is something world changing coming (imagine Instagram reels but 50% of the content is ai generated. Or maybe just all ads are). Remember mobile - a previous paradigm shift - was an existential threat for Facebook 4. This is inline with the complement hypothesis, but what are you going to do with text you generate with llama? Some of that content will go right back on Facebook or one of their many platforms 5. WhatsApp business is a thing, and Facebook is talented enough at engineering that they can mimic any cool chat bot tools people build and integrate them into that 6. It's free for them (what are the downsides?) and reputationally gives them a certain kind of moral high ground compared to Google or OpenAI 7. Oh, the publicity will sell users on accessing the llama API hosted on Google (which pays Facebook money) What are the downsides? Like seriously!

smoldesu 3y ago
Additionally, this is not an overnight decision for Facebook/Meta. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that this is a snap decision by them, but Facebook's AI research labs outdate and outspend most of FAANG's. Their only real competitor is Google, who practically rolled over dead once GGML/Pytorch cemented itself as the cutting-edge. It's very possible that Llama had been ready for months, and Meta was internally unsure how to roll it out.

grey8 3y ago

There is a podcast episode of Lex Fridman talking with Mark Zuckerberg, and in this episode Mark states that the reason Llama is (and will stay) open source is that that is the deal that Meta has with the engineers. To get top engineers, there had to be some agreement, and this agreement apparently is that the engineers want their work open sourced. Pretty cool, IMHO.

easygenes 3y ago
When Llama first released in Feb Yann tweeted that they were committed to releasing all models under GPL, and yet that’s not the license we all got. There’s been a move to more permissive licensing since. So it’s been a bit of a tug of war still.