4 ms·

What do you mean?

CuriouslyC 3y ago
In pretty much every interview, Yann has talked about how important that AI infrastructure is open and distributed for the good of humanity, and how he wouldn't work for a company that wasn't open. Since Mark doesn't have an AI product to cannibalize, it's in his interest to devalue the AI products of others ("salting the earth").
- Legend2440 3y ago
  I don't see how they're devaluing other people's AI products.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    The Llama models have played a large part in fostering the development of the open source LLM ecosystem, and I expect Llama3 to put in performance > mistral medium and anthropic haiku while being fully open and able to be run on consumer hardware.
  - crakenzak 3y ago
    The angle is that by releasing cutting edge AI research to the public openly, the relative difference between open source models/tech and closed source tech shrinks. Whether or not you think the "value" of AI products is proportional to their performance gap vs the next closest thing or not is up to you. Very interesting PG essay I read recently talks about the opposite of this (Superlinear returns) where if you're half as good as the next competitor, you don't get half the customers, you get 0. Essay: https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
    - nova22033 3y ago
      New Linux versions don't "salt the earth" for Windows.
      - nemothekid 3y ago
        Linux is not competitive as a desktop platform for regular users, but linux did "salt the earth" for the Server market.
      - dkarras 3y ago
        Windows should always provide enough additional value that makes up for what they are asking as money - compared to the free option. That is the point. If you had no other viable options, then they could do whatever they like. Now they have a baseline to compete with and it is very hard to compete with free.
  - conradev 3y ago
    Mistral makes comparable models to Facebook. Mistral charges money, Facebook does not. This negatively affect’s Mistral’s pricing power because a customer can get 70% of the performance they need for 0% of the cost. The “0% of the cost” part is unique to software businesses because you can copy software so cheaply
  - jedberg 3y ago
    It's called commoditize the compliment. If they make AI models free to use it makes OpenAI nearly valueless, which means that they can't survive and then sell Meta's competitors a better GenAI product than Meta can make themselves. So basically since they don't make money directly on GenAI, it makes sense for them to release it for free so no one else can have something better, so they don't have to compete on GenAI abilities with their competitors.
- chasd00 3y ago
  is "salting the earth", in the biblical sense of destroying your enemy and their land to the point where not even plants grow again, a SV term used for companies that promote open source?
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    It's a term used for making a certain type of business unviable. In this case, high quality open models will make closed source models less viable, since the closed source model providers won't be able to charge monopoly prices for their models, but will have to approach the price of cloud GPU time or lose customers to equally capable open models.

What do you mean?

In pretty much every interview, Yann has talked about how important that AI infrastructure is open and distributed for the good of humanity, and how he wouldn't work for a company that wasn't open. Since Mark doesn't have an AI product to cannibalize, it's in his interest to devalue the AI products of others ("salting the earth").

Legend2440 3y ago
I don't see how they're devaluing other people's AI products.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  The Llama models have played a large part in fostering the development of the open source LLM ecosystem, and I expect Llama3 to put in performance > mistral medium and anthropic haiku while being fully open and able to be run on consumer hardware.
- crakenzak 3y ago
  The angle is that by releasing cutting edge AI research to the public openly, the relative difference between open source models/tech and closed source tech shrinks. Whether or not you think the "value" of AI products is proportional to their performance gap vs the next closest thing or not is up to you. Very interesting PG essay I read recently talks about the opposite of this (Superlinear returns) where if you're half as good as the next competitor, you don't get half the customers, you get 0. Essay: https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
  - nova22033 3y ago
    New Linux versions don't "salt the earth" for Windows.
    - nemothekid 3y ago
      Linux is not competitive as a desktop platform for regular users, but linux did "salt the earth" for the Server market.
    - dkarras 3y ago
      Windows should always provide enough additional value that makes up for what they are asking as money - compared to the free option. That is the point. If you had no other viable options, then they could do whatever they like. Now they have a baseline to compete with and it is very hard to compete with free.
- conradev 3y ago
  Mistral makes comparable models to Facebook. Mistral charges money, Facebook does not. This negatively affect’s Mistral’s pricing power because a customer can get 70% of the performance they need for 0% of the cost. The “0% of the cost” part is unique to software businesses because you can copy software so cheaply
- jedberg 3y ago
  It's called commoditize the compliment. If they make AI models free to use it makes OpenAI nearly valueless, which means that they can't survive and then sell Meta's competitors a better GenAI product than Meta can make themselves. So basically since they don't make money directly on GenAI, it makes sense for them to release it for free so no one else can have something better, so they don't have to compete on GenAI abilities with their competitors.
chasd00 3y ago
is "salting the earth", in the biblical sense of destroying your enemy and their land to the point where not even plants grow again, a SV term used for companies that promote open source?
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  It's a term used for making a certain type of business unviable. In this case, high quality open models will make closed source models less viable, since the closed source model providers won't be able to charge monopoly prices for their models, but will have to approach the price of cloud GPU time or lose customers to equally capable open models.