26 ms·

I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck and Yann and the rest of the Meta team have adopted an open approach and are sharing the model weights, the t

I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck and Yann and the rest of the Meta team have adopted an open approach and are sharing the model weights, the tokenizer, information about the training data, etc. They, more than anyone else, are responsible for the explosion of open research and improvement that has happened with things like llama.cpp that now allow you to run quite decent models locally on consumer hardware in a way that you can avoid any censorship or controls. Not that I even want to make inference requests that would run afoul of the controls put in place by OpenAI and Anthropic (I mostly use it for coding stuff), but I hate the idea of this powerful technology being behind walls and having gate-keepers controlling how you can use it. Obviously, there are plenty of people and companies out there that also believe in the open approach. But they don't have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and billions in sustainable annual cash flow and literally ten(s) of billions of dollars worth of GPUs! So it's a lot more impactful when they do it. And it basically sets the ground rules for everyone else, so that Mistral now also feels compelled to release model weights for most of their models. Anyway, Zuck didn't have to go this way. If Facebook were run by "professional" outside managers of the HBS/McKinsey ilk, I think it's quite unlikely that they would be this open with everything, especially after investing so much capital and energy into it. But I am very grateful that they are, and think we all benefit hugely from not only their willingness to be open and share, but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." Thanks Zuck!

paxys 2y ago
You can see from Zuck's interviews that he is still an engineer at heart. Every other big tech company has lost that kind of leadership.
- eigenvalue 2y ago
  For sure. I just started watching the new Dwarkesh interview with Zuck that was just released ( https://t.co/f4h7ko0M7q https://t.co/f4h7ko0M7q ) and you can just tell from the first few minutes that he simply has a different level of enthusiasm and passion and level of engagement than 99% of big tech CEOs.
  - acchow 2y ago
    I've never heard of this person, but many of the questions he asks Zuck show a total lack of any insight in this field. How did this interview even happen?
    - bricee98 2y ago
      I actually think Dwarkesh is usually pretty good - this interview wasn’t his best (maybe he was a bit nervous because it’s Zuck?) but his show has had a lot of good conversations that get more into the weeds than other shows in my experience
      - jesseduffield 2y ago
        Seconding this opinion: Dwarkesh's podcast is really good. I haven't watched all of the Zuck interview but I recommend others to check out a couple extra episodes to get a more representative sample. He is one of the few postcasters who does his homework.
      - behnamoh 2y ago
        He talks a bit too fast, but I kinda get the vibe that he's genuinely interested in these topics.
    - euiq 2y ago
      He’s built up an impressive amount of clout over a short period of time, mostly by interviewing interesting guests on his podcast while not boring listeners to death (unlike a certain other interviewer with high-caliber guests that shall remain nameless).
      - Mandelmus 2y ago
        What's the meaning of life though, and why is it love?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- schleck8 2y ago
  Depends on your size threshhold. For anything beyond 100 bn in market cap certainly. There is some relatively large companies with a similar flair though, like Cohere and obviously Mistral.
  - mrtranscendence 2y ago
    Well, they're not AI companies, necessarily, or at least not only AI companies, but the big hardware firms tend to have engineers at the helm. That includes Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. (Counterpoint: Apple)
    - coeneedell 2y ago
      Counter counter point: apples hardware division has been doing great work in the last 5 years, it’s their software that seems to have gone off the rails (in my opinion).
      - radlad 2y ago
        I'm not sure how this is a counter-point to the allegation that Tim Cook isn't really an engineer.
    - waffletower 2y ago
      Tim Cook is probably the greatest CFO any company could know. But Apple's capital is vastly squandered with Tim as CEO.
      - paxys 2y ago
        COO, not CFO. He is a supply chain/manufacturing/operations guy.
- Solvency 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - graeme 2y ago
    If you combine engineer mindset, business acumen, relentless drive and do so over decades, you can get outsized results. It's a thing to admire, *even if you dislike the products*. Much the same as you can be awed by Ray Kroc's execution regardless of whether you like McDonald's or what you think of him personally. It simply isn't that common to have that combination of talents at work on one thing at such scale for so long. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had the same combo of really being down in the details despite reaching such heights. You can contrast to Google, a company whose founders had similar traits but who got tired of it. Totally understandable, but it makes a difference in terms of the focus of google today. Again this is true regardless of what you think of Meta on, say, privacy vs. Google's original "Don't be Evil" idea. Saying "wow they still have engineering leadership" is hardly worship. It's a statement of fact.
- axus 2y ago
  I'm happy that he's pouring money into the metaverse, and glad that it's not my money.
- projectileboy 2y ago
  Anyone who made it through CS 121 is an engineer for life.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- a_wild_dandan 2y ago
  Also, being open source adds phenomenal value for Meta: 1. It attracts the world's best academic talent, who deeply want their work shared. AI experts can join any company, so ones which commit to open AI have a huge advantage. 2. Having armies of SWEs contributing millions of free labor hours to test/fix/improve/expand your stuff is incredible. 3. The industry standardizes around their tech, driving down costs and dramatically improving compatibility/extensibility. 4. It creates immense goodwill with basically everyone. 5. Having open AI doesn't hurt their core business. If you're an AI company, giving away your only product isn't tenable (so far). If Meta's 405B model surpasses GPT-4 and Claude Opus as they expect, they release it for free, and (predictably) nothing awful happens -- just incredible unlocks for regular people like Llama 2 -- it'll make much of the industry look like complete clowns. Hiding their models with some pretext about safety, the alarmist alignment rhetoric, will crumble. Like...no, you zealously guard your models because you want to make money, and that's fine. But using some holier-than-thou "it's for your own good" public gaslighting is wildly inappropriate, paternalistic, and condescending. The 405B model will be an enormous middle finger to companies who literally won't even tell you how big their models are (because "safety", I guess). Here's a model better than all of yours, it's open for everyone to benefit from, and it didn't end the world. So go &%$# yourselves.
  - eigenvalue 2y ago
    Yes, I completely agree with every point you made. It’s going to be so satisfying when all the AI safety people realize that their attempts to cram this protectionist/alarmist control down our throats are all for nothing, because there is an even stronger model that is totally open weights, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle!
    - a_wild_dandan 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - aqfamnzc 2y ago
      Hopefully they aren't able to cram it down our legislators' throats... Seems that's what really matters
- stuckkeys 2y ago
  Yeah. He did good.
- nmklnlknklnlk 2y ago
  NVidia, AMD, Microsoft?
  - paxys 2y ago
    Nvidia, maybe. Microsoft, definitely not. Nadella is a successful CEO but is as corporate as they come.
    - Miraste 2y ago
      Nadella has such practiced corporate-speak it's impressive. I went to a two-hour talk and Q&A he did, and he didn't communicate a single piece of real information over the whole session. It was entirely HR filler language, the whole time.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- redbell 2y ago
  Someone, somewhere on YT [1], coined the term Vanilla CEOs to describe non-tech-savvy CEOs, typically MBA graduates, who may struggle to innovate consistently. Unlike their tech-savvy counterparts, these CEOs tend to maintain the status quo rather than pursue bold visions for their companies.. 1. https://youtu.be/gD3RV8nMzh8 https://youtu.be/gD3RV8nMzh8
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >Every other big tech company has lost that kind of leadership. He really is the last man standing from the web 2.0 days. I would have never believed I'd say this 10 years ago, but we're really fortunate for it. The launch of Quest 3 last fall was such a breath of fresh air. To see a CEO actually legitimately excited about something, standing on stage and physically showing it off was like something out of a bygone era.
- m12k 2y ago
  But also: Facebook/Meta got burned when they missed the train on owning a mobile platform, instead having to live in their competitors' houses and being vulnerable to de-platforming on mobile. So they've invested massively in trying to make VR the next big thing to get out from that precarious position, or maybe even to get to own the next big platform after mobile (so far with little to actually show for it at a strategic level). Anyways, what we're now seeing is this mindset reflected in a new way with LLMs - Meta would rather that the next big thing belongs to everybody, than to a competitor. I'm really glad they've taken that approach, but I wouldn't delude myself that it's all hacker-mentality altruism, and not a fair bit of strategic cynicism at work here too. If Zuck thought he could "own" LLMs and make them a walled garden, I'm sure he would, but the ship already sailed on developing a moat like that for anybody that's not OpenAI - now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible.
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    Similarly to Google keeping Android open source, so that Apple wouldn’t completely control the phone market.
    - nalekberov 2y ago
      In fact Google doesn't care much if Apple controls the entire mobile phone market, Android is just guaranteed way of acquiring new users. Now they are paying yearly around $19 billion Apple to be default search engine, I expect without Android this price would be times more.
  - abkolan 2y ago
    > now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible. It's this, and by making it open and available on every cloud out there would make this accessible to other start ups who might play in Meta's competitor's spaces.
- firecall 2y ago
  Apple being the most egregious example IMHO. Purely my opinion as a long time Apple fan, but I cant help but think that Tim Cook's polices are harming the Apple brand in ways that we wont see for a few years. Much like Balmer did at Microsoft. But who knows - I'm just making conversation :-)
- bionhoward 2y ago
  Are you joking? “ v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or derivative works thereof). “ is no sign of a strong engineering culture, it’s a sign of greed.
- cush 2y ago
  This is both their biggest strength and weakness
jwoq9118 2y ago
The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contributions to open source and raising salaries have been through Facebook and now Meta.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  A person (or a company) can be two very different things at the same time. It's undeniable as you say that there have been a lot of high-profile open source innovations coming from Facebook (ReactJS, LLaMA, HHVM, ...), but the price that society at large paid for all of this is not insignificant either, and Meta hasn't meaningfully apologized for the worst of it.
  - jwoq9118 2y ago
    Meta’s open source contributions stand on their own as great regardless of their obviously shady social media management and privacy tactics. The former are feats of software engineering, the later have a lot to do with things far beyond problems like handing data at scale, refreshing feeds fast, ensuring atomic updates to user profiles, etc. Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  > his contributions to ... raising salaries It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams. Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
  - 2y ago
noiseinvacuum 2y ago
Good thing that he's only 39 years old and seems more energetic than ever to run his company. Having a passionate founder is, imo, a big advantage for Meta compared to other big tech companies.
- tmalsburg2 2y ago
  Love how everyone is romanticizing his engineering mindset. But have we already forgotten that he was even more passionate about the metaverse which, as far as I can tell, was a 50B failure?
  - dntrkv 2y ago
    I think that part of his bet is that AI is a key component of getting the metaverse to take off. E.g. generating content for the metaverse via AI
    - HWR_14 2y ago
      It's hard for me to imagine AI really helping Meta. It might make content cheaper, but Meta was not budget limited.
  - ravetcofx 2y ago
    What's wrong with someone playing with millennia equivalent of millions of human life times worth of income like a disposable toy? /s
    - dntrkv 2y ago
      Yeah because all that research and knowledge completely dissipates because the business hasn’t recouped its R&D costs. Apple famously brought the iPhone into existence without any prior R&D or failed attempts to build similar devices.
  - filoleg 2y ago
    Having an engineering mindset is not the same as never making mistakes (or never being too early to the market). The only way you won’t make those mistakes and keep a perfect record is if you never do anything major or step out of the comfort zone. If Apple didn’t try and fail with Newton[0] (which was too early to the market for many reasons, both tech-related and not), we might’ve not had iPhone today. The engineering mindset would be to analyze how and why it happened the way it did, assess whether you can address those issues well, decide whether to proceed again or not (and how), and then execute. Obsessing over a perfect track record is the opposite of the engineering mindset imo. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
syndacks 2y ago
[flagged]
swalsh 2y ago
Why is Meta doing it though? This is an astronomical investment. What do they gain from it?
- eigenvalue 2y ago
  They will be able to integrate intelligence into all their product offerings without having to share the data with any outside organization. Tools that can help you create posts for social media (like an AI social media manager), or something that can help you create your listing to sell an item on Facebook Marketplace, tools that can help edit or translate your messages on Messenger/Whatsapp, etc. Also, it can allow them to create whole new product categories. There's a lot you can do with multimodal intelligent agents! Even if they share the models themselves, they will have insights into how to best use and serve those models efficiently and at scale. And it makes AI researchers more excited to work at Meta because then they can get credit for their discoveries instead of hoarding them in secret for the company.
- woile 2y ago
  If they start selling ai in their platform, it's a really good option, as people know they can run it somewhere else if they had to (for any reason, e.g: you could make a poc with their platform but then because of regulations you need to self host, can you do that with other offers?)
- tinyspacewizard 2y ago
  I think what Meta is doing is really smart. We don't really know where AI will be useful in a business sense yet (the apps with users are losing money) but a good bet is that incumbent platforms stand to benefit the most once these uses are discovered. What Meta is doing is making it easier for other orgs to find those use-cases (and take on the risk) whilst keeping the ability to jump in and capitalize on it when it materializes. As for X-Risk? I don't think any of the big tech leadsership actually beleive in that. I also think that deep down a lot of the AI safety crowd love solving hard problems and collecting stock options. On cost, the AI hype raises Met's valuation by more than the cost of engineers and server farms.
  - 2y ago
deelowe 2y ago
Meta also spearheaded the open compute project. I originally joined Google because of their commitment to open source and was extremely disappointed when I didn't see that culture continue as we worked on exascale solutions. Glad to see Meta carrying the torch here. Hope it continues.
- eru 2y ago
  When did you join Google?
  - deelowe 2y ago
    mid-2000s just prior to the ipo.
    - eru 2y ago
      Oh, I see, that must have been quite the journey. I joined in 2014, and even I saw the changes in just a few years when I was there. Still I was a bit baffled reading all the lamenters: I joined late enough that I had no illusions and always saw Google as doing pretty well for an 'enterprise', instead of feeling and expressing constant disappointment that the glory days were over.
- gliched_robot 2y ago
  I see what you did here <q> carrying the "torch" <q>. LOL
insanebrain 2y ago
They're sharing it for a reason. That reason is to disarm their opponents.
elevatedastalt 2y ago
That's coz he is a founder CEO. Those guys are built different. It's rare for the careerist MBA types to match their passion or sincerity. There are many things I can criticize Zuck for but lack of sincerity for the mission is not one of them.
- szundi 2y ago
  It is just the reverse: he is successful because he is like that and lots of founder ceos are jellies in comparison
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    I dunno. I find a conviction in passion in founder CEOs that is missing in folks who replace them. Compare Larry & Sergey with Pichai, or Gates with Balmer.
    - spaceguillotine 2y ago
      how can anyone doubt Ballmer's passion after his sweaty stage march. He ain't in charge anymore anyway. Gates was more methodical evil than passionate and his big moves were all just stabbing someone else to take their place.
      - RobotToaster 2y ago
        I think he managed to buck the trend because, despite not being one, he liked developers (some would say a little too much)
    - grepexdev 2y ago
      Don't forget Gavin Belson and Action Jack Barker
      - highwaylights 2y ago
        Action Jack would still be at it but these days he prefers a nice piece of fish.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
It does seem uncharacteristic. Wonder how much of the hate Zuck gets is people that just don't like Facebook, but as person/engineer, his heart is in the right place? It is hard to accept this at face value and not think there is some giant corporate hidden agenda.
m463 2y ago
I kind of wonder. Does what they do counter the growth of Google? I remember reading years ago that page/brin wanted to build an AI. This was long before the AI boom, when saying something like that was just weird (like musk saying he wanted to die on mars weird)
mandeepj 2y ago
> I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck Praise for him at HN? It should be enough of a reason for him to pop a champagne today
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm also surprised at how many positive comments are in this thread. I do hate Facebook, but I also love engineers, so I'm not sure how to feel about this one.
  - jascination 2y ago
    I mean they basically invented, popularised and maintained react/react native which I've built my entire career on, I love them for that.
  - xpe 2y ago
    > I do hate Facebook, but I also love engineers, so I'm not sure how to feel about this one. "it's complicated". Remember that? :) It's also a great way to avoid many classes of bias. One shouldn't aspire to "feel" in any one way. Embrace the complexity.
    - shepherdjerred 2y ago
      You're right. It's just, of course, easier to feel one extreme or the other.
  - vitorbaptistaa 2y ago
    One of the many perks of releasing open-ish models, React, and many other widely used tools over the years. Meta might be the big tech whose open source projects are most widely used. That gives you some dev goodwill, even though your main products profit from some pretty bad stuff.
mywacaday 2y ago
Looks like it can't be accessed outside the states? I get a "Meta AI isn't available yet in your country"
- altilunium 2y ago
  Llama3 is available on Poe.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Call me cynical, but it was the only way not to be outplayed by OpenAI and to compete with Google, etc.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  100%. It was the only real play they had.
  - re5i5tor 2y ago
    Yeah. Very glad Meta is doing what they’re doing here, but the tiger’s not magically changing its stripes. Take care as it might next decide to eat your face.
pankajdoharey 2y ago
Always bet on Zuck!
emrah 2y ago
Let's be honest that he's probably not doing it due to goodness of his heart. He's most likely trying to commoditize the models so he can sell their complement. It's a strategy Joel Spolsky had talked about in the past (for those of you who remember who that is). I'm not sure what the complement of AI models is that Meta can sell exactly, so maybe it's not a good strategy but I'm certain it's a strategy of some sort
- Salgat 2y ago
  Also keep in mind that it's still a proprietary model. Meta gets all the benefits of open source contributions and testing while retaining exclusive business use.
  - kkielhofner 2y ago
    Very wrong. Llama is usable by any company under 700M MAU.
    - Salgat 2y ago
      Do you have a source? Here's the license when you request access from Meta for Llama, unless there's something I'm missing? https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/ EDIT: Looks like they did open up commercial use with version 2 with the explicit restriction to prevent any major competitor to Meta from using Llama, and that any improvements related to Llama can only apply to Llama. So an attempt to expand the scope of usage and adoption of their proprietary model without their main competitors being able to use it, which still fits my original point.
- nh23423fefe 2y ago
  You lead with a command to be honest and then immediately speculate on private unknowable motivations and then attribute, without evidence, his decision to a strategy you can't describe. What is this? Someone said something nice, and you need to "restore balance"
jug 2y ago
Yes - for sure this AI is trained on their vast information base from their social networks and beyond but at least it feels like they're giving back something. I know it's not pure altruism and Zuck has been open about exactly why they do it (tldr - more advantages in advancing AI through the community that ultimately benefits Meta), but they could have opted for completely different paths here.
atleastoptimal 2y ago
It's crazy how the managerial executive class seems to resent the vital essence of their own companies. Based on the behavior, nature, stated beliefs and interviews I've seen of most tech CEOs and CEOs in general, there seems to be almost a natural aversion to talking about things in non hyper-abstracted terms. I get the feeling that the nature of the corporate world is often better understood as a series of rituals to create the illusion of the necessity of the capitalist hierarchy itself. (not that this is exclusive to capitalism, this exists in politics and any system that becomes somewhat self-sustaining) More important than a company doing well is the capacity to use the company as an image/lifestyle enhancement tool for those at the top. So many companies run almost mindlessly as somewhat autonomous machines, allowing pretense and personal egoic myth-making to win over the purpose of the company in the first place. I think this is why Elon, Mark, Jensen, etc. have done so well. They don't perceive their position as founder/CEOs as a class position: a level above the normal lot that requires a lack of caring for tangible matters. They see their companies as ways of making things happen, for better or for worse.
- charlie0 2y ago
  It's because Elon, Mark, and Jensen are true founders. They aren't MBAs who got voted in because shareholders thought they would make them the most money in the shortest amount of time.
hwbunny 2y ago
It's like Elon saying: we have open sourced our patents, use them. Well, use the old patents and stay behind forever....
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Exactly.
nmfisher 2y ago
The quickest way to disabuse yourself of this notion is to login to Facebook. You’ll remember that Zuck makes money from the scummiest pool of trash and misinformation the world has ever seen. He’s basically the Web 2.0 tabloid newspaper king. I don’t really care how much the AI team open sources, the world would be a better place if the entire company ceased to exist.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Yeah lmao, people are giving meta way too much credit here tbh.
- Solvency 2y ago
  [flagged]
xpe 2y ago
> but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." AI safety risk is substantial. It is also testable. (There are prediction markets on it, for example.) Of course, some companies may latch onto various valid arguments for insincere reasons. I'd challenge everyone to closely compare ideas such as "open source software is better" versus "state of the art trained AI models are better developed in the open". The exact same arguments do NOT work for both. It is one thing to publish papers about e.g. transformers. It is another thing to publish the weights of something like GPT 3.5+; it might theoretically be a matter of degree, but that matter of degree makes a real difference, if only in terms of time. Time matters because it gives people and society some time to respond. Software security reports are often made privately or embargoed. Why? We want to give people and companies time to defend their systems. Now consider this thought-experiment: assume LLMs (and their hybrid derivatives) enable perhaps 1,000,000 new kinds of cyberattacks, 1,000 new bioweapon attacks, and so on. Are there are a correspondingly large number of defensive benefits? This is the crux of the question I think. First, I don't expect we're going to get a good assessment of the overall "balance". Second, any claims of "balance" are beside the point, because these attacks and defenses don't simply cancel each other out. The distribution of the AI-fueled capability advance will probably ratchet up risk and instability. Open source software's benefits stem from the assumption that bugs get shallower with more eyes. More eyes means that the open source product gets stronger defensively. With LLMs that publish their weights, both the research and the implementations is out; you can't get guardrails. The closest analogue to an "OSS security report" would take the form of "I just got your LLM to design a novel biological weapon. Do you think you can use it to design an antidote?" A systematic risk-averse person might want to ask: what happens if we enumerate all offensive vs defensive technological shifts? Should we reasonably believe that the benefits outweigh the risks? Unfortunately, the companies making these decisions aren't bearing the risks. This huge externality both pisses me off and scares the shit out of me.
- lannisterstark 2y ago
  I too like making up hypothetical insane scenarios in my head. The difference is that they stay with me in the shower.
firecall 2y ago
I actually think Mr Zuckerburg is maturing and has a chance of developing a public persona of being decent person! I say public persona, as I've never met him, and have no idea what he is like as a person on an individual level. Maturing in general and studying martial arts is likely to be a contributing factor.
Havoc 2y ago
The more likely version is that this course of action is in line with strategy recommended by consultants. Takes the wind out of their competitors sail
courseofaction 2y ago
This is the organization that wouldn't moderate facebook during Myanmarr yeah? The one with all the mental health research they ignore? Zuckerberg states during the interview that once the ai reaches a certain level of capability they will stop releasing weights - i.e. they are going the "OpenAI" route: this is just trying to get ahead of the competition, it's a sound strategy when you're behind to leverage open source. I see no reason to be optimistic about this organization, the open source community should use this an abandon them ASAP.

paxys 2y ago

You can see from Zuck's interviews that he is still an engineer at heart. Every other big tech company has lost that kind of leadership.

eigenvalue 2y ago
For sure. I just started watching the new Dwarkesh interview with Zuck that was just released ( https://t.co/f4h7ko0M7q https://t.co/f4h7ko0M7q ) and you can just tell from the first few minutes that he simply has a different level of enthusiasm and passion and level of engagement than 99% of big tech CEOs.
- acchow 2y ago
  I've never heard of this person, but many of the questions he asks Zuck show a total lack of any insight in this field. How did this interview even happen?
  - bricee98 2y ago
    I actually think Dwarkesh is usually pretty good - this interview wasn’t his best (maybe he was a bit nervous because it’s Zuck?) but his show has had a lot of good conversations that get more into the weeds than other shows in my experience
    - jesseduffield 2y ago
      Seconding this opinion: Dwarkesh's podcast is really good. I haven't watched all of the Zuck interview but I recommend others to check out a couple extra episodes to get a more representative sample. He is one of the few postcasters who does his homework.
    - behnamoh 2y ago
      He talks a bit too fast, but I kinda get the vibe that he's genuinely interested in these topics.
  - euiq 2y ago
    He’s built up an impressive amount of clout over a short period of time, mostly by interviewing interesting guests on his podcast while not boring listeners to death (unlike a certain other interviewer with high-caliber guests that shall remain nameless).
    - Mandelmus 2y ago
      What's the meaning of life though, and why is it love?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
schleck8 2y ago
Depends on your size threshhold. For anything beyond 100 bn in market cap certainly. There is some relatively large companies with a similar flair though, like Cohere and obviously Mistral.
- mrtranscendence 2y ago
  Well, they're not AI companies, necessarily, or at least not only AI companies, but the big hardware firms tend to have engineers at the helm. That includes Nvidia, AMD, and Intel. (Counterpoint: Apple)
  - coeneedell 2y ago
    Counter counter point: apples hardware division has been doing great work in the last 5 years, it’s their software that seems to have gone off the rails (in my opinion).
    - radlad 2y ago
      I'm not sure how this is a counter-point to the allegation that Tim Cook isn't really an engineer.
  - waffletower 2y ago
    Tim Cook is probably the greatest CFO any company could know. But Apple's capital is vastly squandered with Tim as CEO.
    - paxys 2y ago
      COO, not CFO. He is a supply chain/manufacturing/operations guy.
Solvency 2y ago
[flagged]
- graeme 2y ago
  If you combine engineer mindset, business acumen, relentless drive and do so over decades, you can get outsized results. It's a thing to admire, *even if you dislike the products*. Much the same as you can be awed by Ray Kroc's execution regardless of whether you like McDonald's or what you think of him personally. It simply isn't that common to have that combination of talents at work on one thing at such scale for so long. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had the same combo of really being down in the details despite reaching such heights. You can contrast to Google, a company whose founders had similar traits but who got tired of it. Totally understandable, but it makes a difference in terms of the focus of google today. Again this is true regardless of what you think of Meta on, say, privacy vs. Google's original "Don't be Evil" idea. Saying "wow they still have engineering leadership" is hardly worship. It's a statement of fact.
axus 2y ago
I'm happy that he's pouring money into the metaverse, and glad that it's not my money.
projectileboy 2y ago
Anyone who made it through CS 121 is an engineer for life.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
a_wild_dandan 2y ago
Also, being open source adds phenomenal value for Meta: 1. It attracts the world's best academic talent, who deeply want their work shared. AI experts can join any company, so ones which commit to open AI have a huge advantage. 2. Having armies of SWEs contributing millions of free labor hours to test/fix/improve/expand your stuff is incredible. 3. The industry standardizes around their tech, driving down costs and dramatically improving compatibility/extensibility. 4. It creates immense goodwill with basically everyone. 5. Having open AI doesn't hurt their core business. If you're an AI company, giving away your only product isn't tenable (so far). If Meta's 405B model surpasses GPT-4 and Claude Opus as they expect, they release it for free, and (predictably) nothing awful happens -- just incredible unlocks for regular people like Llama 2 -- it'll make much of the industry look like complete clowns. Hiding their models with some pretext about safety, the alarmist alignment rhetoric, will crumble. Like...no, you zealously guard your models because you want to make money, and that's fine. But using some holier-than-thou "it's for your own good" public gaslighting is wildly inappropriate, paternalistic, and condescending. The 405B model will be an enormous middle finger to companies who literally won't even tell you how big their models are (because "safety", I guess). Here's a model better than all of yours, it's open for everyone to benefit from, and it didn't end the world. So go &%$# yourselves.
- eigenvalue 2y ago
  Yes, I completely agree with every point you made. It’s going to be so satisfying when all the AI safety people realize that their attempts to cram this protectionist/alarmist control down our throats are all for nothing, because there is an even stronger model that is totally open weights, and you can never put the genie back in the bottle!
  - a_wild_dandan 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - aqfamnzc 2y ago
    Hopefully they aren't able to cram it down our legislators' throats... Seems that's what really matters
stuckkeys 2y ago
Yeah. He did good.
nmklnlknklnlk 2y ago
NVidia, AMD, Microsoft?
- paxys 2y ago
  Nvidia, maybe. Microsoft, definitely not. Nadella is a successful CEO but is as corporate as they come.
  - Miraste 2y ago
    Nadella has such practiced corporate-speak it's impressive. I went to a two-hour talk and Q&A he did, and he didn't communicate a single piece of real information over the whole session. It was entirely HR filler language, the whole time.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
redbell 2y ago
Someone, somewhere on YT [1], coined the term Vanilla CEOs to describe non-tech-savvy CEOs, typically MBA graduates, who may struggle to innovate consistently. Unlike their tech-savvy counterparts, these CEOs tend to maintain the status quo rather than pursue bold visions for their companies.. 1. https://youtu.be/gD3RV8nMzh8 https://youtu.be/gD3RV8nMzh8
ramesh31 2y ago
>Every other big tech company has lost that kind of leadership. He really is the last man standing from the web 2.0 days. I would have never believed I'd say this 10 years ago, but we're really fortunate for it. The launch of Quest 3 last fall was such a breath of fresh air. To see a CEO actually legitimately excited about something, standing on stage and physically showing it off was like something out of a bygone era.
m12k 2y ago
But also: Facebook/Meta got burned when they missed the train on owning a mobile platform, instead having to live in their competitors' houses and being vulnerable to de-platforming on mobile. So they've invested massively in trying to make VR the next big thing to get out from that precarious position, or maybe even to get to own the next big platform after mobile (so far with little to actually show for it at a strategic level). Anyways, what we're now seeing is this mindset reflected in a new way with LLMs - Meta would rather that the next big thing belongs to everybody, than to a competitor. I'm really glad they've taken that approach, but I wouldn't delude myself that it's all hacker-mentality altruism, and not a fair bit of strategic cynicism at work here too. If Zuck thought he could "own" LLMs and make them a walled garden, I'm sure he would, but the ship already sailed on developing a moat like that for anybody that's not OpenAI - now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  Similarly to Google keeping Android open source, so that Apple wouldn’t completely control the phone market.
  - nalekberov 2y ago
    In fact Google doesn't care much if Apple controls the entire mobile phone market, Android is just guaranteed way of acquiring new users. Now they are paying yearly around $19 billion Apple to be default search engine, I expect without Android this price would be times more.
- abkolan 2y ago
  > now it's in Zuck's interest to get his competitor's moat bridged as fast as possible. It's this, and by making it open and available on every cloud out there would make this accessible to other start ups who might play in Meta's competitor's spaces.
firecall 2y ago
Apple being the most egregious example IMHO. Purely my opinion as a long time Apple fan, but I cant help but think that Tim Cook's polices are harming the Apple brand in ways that we wont see for a few years. Much like Balmer did at Microsoft. But who knows - I'm just making conversation :-)
bionhoward 2y ago
Are you joking? “ v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or derivative works thereof). “ is no sign of a strong engineering culture, it’s a sign of greed.
cush 2y ago
This is both their biggest strength and weakness

jwoq9118 2y ago

The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contributions to open source and raising salaries have been through Facebook and now Meta.

mschuster91 2y ago
A person (or a company) can be two very different things at the same time. It's undeniable as you say that there have been a lot of high-profile open source innovations coming from Facebook (ReactJS, LLaMA, HHVM, ...), but the price that society at large paid for all of this is not insignificant either, and Meta hasn't meaningfully apologized for the worst of it.
- jwoq9118 2y ago
  Meta’s open source contributions stand on their own as great regardless of their obviously shady social media management and privacy tactics. The former are feats of software engineering, the later have a lot to do with things far beyond problems like handing data at scale, refreshing feeds fast, ensuring atomic updates to user profiles, etc. Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.
swatcoder 2y ago
> his contributions to ... raising salaries It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams. Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
- 2y ago

noiseinvacuum 2y ago

Good thing that he's only 39 years old and seems more energetic than ever to run his company. Having a passionate founder is, imo, a big advantage for Meta compared to other big tech companies.

tmalsburg2 2y ago
Love how everyone is romanticizing his engineering mindset. But have we already forgotten that he was even more passionate about the metaverse which, as far as I can tell, was a 50B failure?
- dntrkv 2y ago
  I think that part of his bet is that AI is a key component of getting the metaverse to take off. E.g. generating content for the metaverse via AI
  - HWR_14 2y ago
    It's hard for me to imagine AI really helping Meta. It might make content cheaper, but Meta was not budget limited.
- ravetcofx 2y ago
  What's wrong with someone playing with millennia equivalent of millions of human life times worth of income like a disposable toy? /s
  - dntrkv 2y ago
    Yeah because all that research and knowledge completely dissipates because the business hasn’t recouped its R&D costs. Apple famously brought the iPhone into existence without any prior R&D or failed attempts to build similar devices.
- filoleg 2y ago
  Having an engineering mindset is not the same as never making mistakes (or never being too early to the market). The only way you won’t make those mistakes and keep a perfect record is if you never do anything major or step out of the comfort zone. If Apple didn’t try and fail with Newton[0] (which was too early to the market for many reasons, both tech-related and not), we might’ve not had iPhone today. The engineering mindset would be to analyze how and why it happened the way it did, assess whether you can address those issues well, decide whether to proceed again or not (and how), and then execute. Obsessing over a perfect track record is the opposite of the engineering mindset imo. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

syndacks 2y ago

[flagged]

swalsh 2y ago

Why is Meta doing it though? This is an astronomical investment. What do they gain from it?

eigenvalue 2y ago
They will be able to integrate intelligence into all their product offerings without having to share the data with any outside organization. Tools that can help you create posts for social media (like an AI social media manager), or something that can help you create your listing to sell an item on Facebook Marketplace, tools that can help edit or translate your messages on Messenger/Whatsapp, etc. Also, it can allow them to create whole new product categories. There's a lot you can do with multimodal intelligent agents! Even if they share the models themselves, they will have insights into how to best use and serve those models efficiently and at scale. And it makes AI researchers more excited to work at Meta because then they can get credit for their discoveries instead of hoarding them in secret for the company.
woile 2y ago
If they start selling ai in their platform, it's a really good option, as people know they can run it somewhere else if they had to (for any reason, e.g: you could make a poc with their platform but then because of regulations you need to self host, can you do that with other offers?)
tinyspacewizard 2y ago
I think what Meta is doing is really smart. We don't really know where AI will be useful in a business sense yet (the apps with users are losing money) but a good bet is that incumbent platforms stand to benefit the most once these uses are discovered. What Meta is doing is making it easier for other orgs to find those use-cases (and take on the risk) whilst keeping the ability to jump in and capitalize on it when it materializes. As for X-Risk? I don't think any of the big tech leadsership actually beleive in that. I also think that deep down a lot of the AI safety crowd love solving hard problems and collecting stock options. On cost, the AI hype raises Met's valuation by more than the cost of engineers and server farms.
- 2y ago

deelowe 2y ago

Meta also spearheaded the open compute project. I originally joined Google because of their commitment to open source and was extremely disappointed when I didn't see that culture continue as we worked on exascale solutions. Glad to see Meta carrying the torch here. Hope it continues.

eru 2y ago
When did you join Google?
- deelowe 2y ago
  mid-2000s just prior to the ipo.
  - eru 2y ago
    Oh, I see, that must have been quite the journey. I joined in 2014, and even I saw the changes in just a few years when I was there. Still I was a bit baffled reading all the lamenters: I joined late enough that I had no illusions and always saw Google as doing pretty well for an 'enterprise', instead of feeling and expressing constant disappointment that the glory days were over.
gliched_robot 2y ago
I see what you did here <q> carrying the "torch" <q>. LOL

insanebrain 2y ago

They're sharing it for a reason. That reason is to disarm their opponents.

elevatedastalt 2y ago

That's coz he is a founder CEO. Those guys are built different. It's rare for the careerist MBA types to match their passion or sincerity. There are many things I can criticize Zuck for but lack of sincerity for the mission is not one of them.

szundi 2y ago
It is just the reverse: he is successful because he is like that and lots of founder ceos are jellies in comparison
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  I dunno. I find a conviction in passion in founder CEOs that is missing in folks who replace them. Compare Larry & Sergey with Pichai, or Gates with Balmer.
  - spaceguillotine 2y ago
    how can anyone doubt Ballmer's passion after his sweaty stage march. He ain't in charge anymore anyway. Gates was more methodical evil than passionate and his big moves were all just stabbing someone else to take their place.
    - RobotToaster 2y ago
      I think he managed to buck the trend because, despite not being one, he liked developers (some would say a little too much)
  - grepexdev 2y ago
    Don't forget Gavin Belson and Action Jack Barker
    - highwaylights 2y ago
      Action Jack would still be at it but these days he prefers a nice piece of fish.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

It does seem uncharacteristic. Wonder how much of the hate Zuck gets is people that just don't like Facebook, but as person/engineer, his heart is in the right place? It is hard to accept this at face value and not think there is some giant corporate hidden agenda.

m463 2y ago

I kind of wonder. Does what they do counter the growth of Google? I remember reading years ago that page/brin wanted to build an AI. This was long before the AI boom, when saying something like that was just weird (like musk saying he wanted to die on mars weird)

mandeepj 2y ago

> I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck Praise for him at HN? It should be enough of a reason for him to pop a champagne today

shepherdjerred 2y ago
Yeah, I'm also surprised at how many positive comments are in this thread. I do hate Facebook, but I also love engineers, so I'm not sure how to feel about this one.
- jascination 2y ago
  I mean they basically invented, popularised and maintained react/react native which I've built my entire career on, I love them for that.
- xpe 2y ago
  > I do hate Facebook, but I also love engineers, so I'm not sure how to feel about this one. "it's complicated". Remember that? :) It's also a great way to avoid many classes of bias. One shouldn't aspire to "feel" in any one way. Embrace the complexity.
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    You're right. It's just, of course, easier to feel one extreme or the other.
- vitorbaptistaa 2y ago
  One of the many perks of releasing open-ish models, React, and many other widely used tools over the years. Meta might be the big tech whose open source projects are most widely used. That gives you some dev goodwill, even though your main products profit from some pretty bad stuff.

mywacaday 2y ago

Looks like it can't be accessed outside the states? I get a "Meta AI isn't available yet in your country"

altilunium 2y ago
Llama3 is available on Poe.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Call me cynical, but it was the only way not to be outplayed by OpenAI and to compete with Google, etc.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
100%. It was the only real play they had.
- re5i5tor 2y ago
  Yeah. Very glad Meta is doing what they’re doing here, but the tiger’s not magically changing its stripes. Take care as it might next decide to eat your face.

pankajdoharey 2y ago

Always bet on Zuck!

emrah 2y ago

Let's be honest that he's probably not doing it due to goodness of his heart. He's most likely trying to commoditize the models so he can sell their complement. It's a strategy Joel Spolsky had talked about in the past (for those of you who remember who that is). I'm not sure what the complement of AI models is that Meta can sell exactly, so maybe it's not a good strategy but I'm certain it's a strategy of some sort

Salgat 2y ago
Also keep in mind that it's still a proprietary model. Meta gets all the benefits of open source contributions and testing while retaining exclusive business use.
- kkielhofner 2y ago
  Very wrong. Llama is usable by any company under 700M MAU.
  - Salgat 2y ago
    Do you have a source? Here's the license when you request access from Meta for Llama, unless there's something I'm missing? https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/ https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/ EDIT: Looks like they did open up commercial use with version 2 with the explicit restriction to prevent any major competitor to Meta from using Llama, and that any improvements related to Llama can only apply to Llama. So an attempt to expand the scope of usage and adoption of their proprietary model without their main competitors being able to use it, which still fits my original point.
nh23423fefe 2y ago
You lead with a command to be honest and then immediately speculate on private unknowable motivations and then attribute, without evidence, his decision to a strategy you can't describe. What is this? Someone said something nice, and you need to "restore balance"

jug 2y ago

Yes - for sure this AI is trained on their vast information base from their social networks and beyond but at least it feels like they're giving back something. I know it's not pure altruism and Zuck has been open about exactly why they do it (tldr - more advantages in advancing AI through the community that ultimately benefits Meta), but they could have opted for completely different paths here.

atleastoptimal 2y ago

It's crazy how the managerial executive class seems to resent the vital essence of their own companies. Based on the behavior, nature, stated beliefs and interviews I've seen of most tech CEOs and CEOs in general, there seems to be almost a natural aversion to talking about things in non hyper-abstracted terms. I get the feeling that the nature of the corporate world is often better understood as a series of rituals to create the illusion of the necessity of the capitalist hierarchy itself. (not that this is exclusive to capitalism, this exists in politics and any system that becomes somewhat self-sustaining) More important than a company doing well is the capacity to use the company as an image/lifestyle enhancement tool for those at the top. So many companies run almost mindlessly as somewhat autonomous machines, allowing pretense and personal egoic myth-making to win over the purpose of the company in the first place. I think this is why Elon, Mark, Jensen, etc. have done so well. They don't perceive their position as founder/CEOs as a class position: a level above the normal lot that requires a lack of caring for tangible matters. They see their companies as ways of making things happen, for better or for worse.

charlie0 2y ago
It's because Elon, Mark, and Jensen are true founders. They aren't MBAs who got voted in because shareholders thought they would make them the most money in the shortest amount of time.

hwbunny 2y ago

It's like Elon saying: we have open sourced our patents, use them. Well, use the old patents and stay behind forever....

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Exactly.

nmfisher 2y ago

The quickest way to disabuse yourself of this notion is to login to Facebook. You’ll remember that Zuck makes money from the scummiest pool of trash and misinformation the world has ever seen. He’s basically the Web 2.0 tabloid newspaper king. I don’t really care how much the AI team open sources, the world would be a better place if the entire company ceased to exist.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
Yeah lmao, people are giving meta way too much credit here tbh.
Solvency 2y ago
[flagged]

xpe 2y ago

> but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." AI safety risk is substantial. It is also testable. (There are prediction markets on it, for example.) Of course, some companies may latch onto various valid arguments for insincere reasons. I'd challenge everyone to closely compare ideas such as "open source software is better" versus "state of the art trained AI models are better developed in the open". The exact same arguments do NOT work for both. It is one thing to publish papers about e.g. transformers. It is another thing to publish the weights of something like GPT 3.5+; it might theoretically be a matter of degree, but that matter of degree makes a real difference, if only in terms of time. Time matters because it gives people and society some time to respond. Software security reports are often made privately or embargoed. Why? We want to give people and companies time to defend their systems. Now consider this thought-experiment: assume LLMs (and their hybrid derivatives) enable perhaps 1,000,000 new kinds of cyberattacks, 1,000 new bioweapon attacks, and so on. Are there are a correspondingly large number of defensive benefits? This is the crux of the question I think. First, I don't expect we're going to get a good assessment of the overall "balance". Second, any claims of "balance" are beside the point, because these attacks and defenses don't simply cancel each other out. The distribution of the AI-fueled capability advance will probably ratchet up risk and instability. Open source software's benefits stem from the assumption that bugs get shallower with more eyes. More eyes means that the open source product gets stronger defensively. With LLMs that publish their weights, both the research and the implementations is out; you can't get guardrails. The closest analogue to an "OSS security report" would take the form of "I just got your LLM to design a novel biological weapon. Do you think you can use it to design an antidote?" A systematic risk-averse person might want to ask: what happens if we enumerate all offensive vs defensive technological shifts? Should we reasonably believe that the benefits outweigh the risks? Unfortunately, the companies making these decisions aren't bearing the risks. This huge externality both pisses me off and scares the shit out of me.

lannisterstark 2y ago
I too like making up hypothetical insane scenarios in my head. The difference is that they stay with me in the shower.

firecall 2y ago

I actually think Mr Zuckerburg is maturing and has a chance of developing a public persona of being decent person! I say public persona, as I've never met him, and have no idea what he is like as a person on an individual level. Maturing in general and studying martial arts is likely to be a contributing factor.

Havoc 2y ago

The more likely version is that this course of action is in line with strategy recommended by consultants. Takes the wind out of their competitors sail

courseofaction 2y ago

This is the organization that wouldn't moderate facebook during Myanmarr yeah? The one with all the mental health research they ignore? Zuckerberg states during the interview that once the ai reaches a certain level of capability they will stop releasing weights - i.e. they are going the "OpenAI" route: this is just trying to get ahead of the competition, it's a sound strategy when you're behind to leverage open source. I see no reason to be optimistic about this organization, the open source community should use this an abandon them ASAP.