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Is it just my perception or has Meta become cool again by sharing a ton of research and open source (or open weights) work? Facebook's reputation was at the bo

• mrguyorama 2y ago
  How the hell does releasing one audio codec undo years and years of privacy nightmare, being a willing bystander in an actual genocide, experimenting with the emotions of depressed kids, and collusion to depress wages?
  • pt_PT_guy 2y ago
    they also did release LLM models, and zstd, and mold, and and and... a lot of stuff
    • visarga 2y ago
      React and Pytorch compare that to Angular and TensorFlow, such a difference in culture
      • hot_gril 2y ago
        Easy vs tons-o-boilerplate.
    • cheema33 2y ago
      Don't forget React. The most popular frontend stack at the moment. Been that way for some time. And GraphQL, Relay, Stylex...
      • XlA5vEKsMISoIln 2y ago
        >React Ah yes, the <body id="app"></body> websites.
        • cztomsik 2y ago
          How is that specific to React? And who would use webapp technology for a website?
          • XlA5vEKsMISoIln 2y ago
            According to cheema33 React is most "popular frontend stack", but I'm not allowed ask questions of why websites demand JS to display basic content... I suppose my reply could have been more _constructive_ as to ask "by whose count" or "how does popularity correspond to quality" but that's like playing chess by one step in front of you. Look, I'm seeing an increase of blogs made with an implication that _infinity_ amount of visits requires less resources than one and I don't just find it true.
        • account42 2y ago
          Yeah, feels more like another reason to hate them for contributing to the enshittification of the web.
    • ComputerGuru 2y ago
      zstd and mold are personal projects regardless of employer. That said, I didn’t know mold was written by a meta guy.
      • lucb1e 2y ago
        Zstd is a personal project? Surely it's not by accident in the Facebook GitHub organization? And that you need to sign a contract on code.facebook.com before they'll consider merging any contributions? That seems like an odd claim, unless it used to be a personal project and Facebook took it over (https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md#contributor-license-agreement-cla https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/CONTRIBUTING.md#co...)
        • ComputerGuru 2y ago
          All Google dev’s personal projects are under the Google account on GH for legal reasons. I assume the same for Facebook. I believe fb championed zstd and lets the dev work on it at work but it was a personal project iirc.
    • account42 2y ago
      > mold The linker? How is facebook involved in that?
  • coconut08 2y ago
    it isn't just one audio codec. they also released and continue to release the best self hostable large language model weights, they have authored many open source projects that are staples today such as zstandard, react, pytorch
  • stuxnet79 2y ago
    You will need to provide citations on the last point as Facebook are widely known to have broken the gentleman's agreement between Apple and Google that was suppressing tech pay in the early 2010s.
    • giraffe_lady 2y ago
      OK sure even if they didn't do that we're still left with "knowingly abetted a genocide" which no amount of open source work can ever balance out.
      • rylittle 2y ago
        context?
        • _whiteCaps_ 2y ago
          https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
          • robertlagrant 2y ago
            This article seems to not really mention the "knowingly" or the "abetted". If there are people killing other people, I wouldn't say that a communication method was to blame. In Scream, Sidney didn't sue the phone company who let the killer call her from inside the house. The idea that some news feed posts whipped people up into a killing frenzy just sounds absurd. I wish the author could see that, and if the case is valid, to provide it, instead of some pretty tenuous claims of connection strung together to lead up to a demand for money. I did try to go to the link that evidenced the "multiple" times Facebook was contacted in a 5 year period, but I couldn't get through. How many times was it, for anyone who can?
            • giraffe_lady 2y ago
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • yard2010 2y ago
    You forgot selling the 2016 US elections to Putin for 100k[0] Good luck undoing that releasing codecs haha [0] https://time.com/4930532/facebook-russian-accounts-2016-election/ https://time.com/4930532/facebook-russian-accounts-2016-elec...
    • lovecg 2y ago
      If $100k worth of internet ads can really sway an election boy are we in trouble.
• nine_k 2y ago
  I have the same impression. Facebook the social network reputation may be not shiny, but Meta the engineering company reputation is pretty high, to my mind. It's somehow similar to IBM, who may look not stellar as a hardware or software solutions provider, but still have quite cool research and microelectronics branches.
• danuker 2y ago
  I don't think they made up for it. They are training AIs off of personal data. The open stuff are a desperate red herring. https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/meta_ai_training/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/meta_ai_training/
  • jhallenworld 2y ago
    So this is one argument- another is that I'm impressed that they got their own LLM running and integrated into facebook messenger. I ran across this interesting graphic recently: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/4/23987953/the-gpu-haves-and-have-nots https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/4/23987953/the-gpu-haves-an... Suddenly facebook is useful as a search engine.. Also interesting is that Meta AI is much faster than ChatGPT from end-user's point of view, but results not quite as good. Here is a comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vLvLN5wxS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vLvLN5wxS0
  • jen729w 2y ago
    > a desperate red herring. Or you can recognise that ‘Meta’ isn’t a conscious entity, and that it’s perfectly likely that there are some people over there doing amazing open-source work, and different people over there making ethically dubious decisions when building their LLMs.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • account42 2y ago
      The people doing amazing open-source work are also making the ethically dubious decision of supporting the other group by working for FB.
      • jen729w 2y ago
        Ah I think this is bullshit to be honest. I’ve worked for dozens of organisations in my career. Large and small, competent and not. Usually not. In that time did I make some ‘ethically correct’ choice to leave an enormous organisation because some other part of that organisation did something that wasn’t ethically perfect? Never. Not one time. And I’m an ethical person. I consider this stuff deeply. Here I am bothering to have this conversation with you. But, what, every person who has an interesting job doing good things — remember, we’re talking about engineers developing a new audio codec — so those people who have interesting jobs doing good things with a great team are expected to look over there to some distant part of the org, to teams they’re barely aware of, let alone have spoken to, and they’re expected to quit their jobs because of the ‘ethically dubious’ stuff going on over there? Sorry. Unrealistic, idealistic bullshit. I’ve never done it and neither have you.
• RIMR 2y ago
  I would say that I have a very favorable opinion of Meta in terms of how they share their research and open source their software. I would say that I have a very unfavorable opinion of Meta in terms of their commitment to privacy, security, and social responsibility.
• lucb1e 2y ago
  research department != product department Microsoft Research also puts out some really cool stuff, but that does not mean the "same" Microsoft can't show ads in their OS' start menu for people's constant enjoyment. I noticed this interesting discrepancy in Microsoft some years ago as a teenager; it does not surprise me at all that Facebook has a division doing cool things (zstandard, etc.) and a completely separate set of people working towards completely different goals simultaneously. Probably most companies larger than a couple hundred people have such departmental discrepancies
  • callalex 2y ago
    I racked my brain and couldn’t think of a single example of something released by Microsoft Research offhand, so I proceeded to visit their website. It can be found at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ I found exactly zero things that they have provided to the world. Literally none, and I really came in with an open mind. All I found was marketer drivel telling me how I should feel about the impact of the marketing copy I was currently reading. No concrete examples after fanning out 3 links deep into every article posted on that site. I must be missing something so can you point me to at least one example of work that’s come out of Microsoft Research on the same scale as Meta’s LLM models or ReactJS?
    • throwaway91239 2y ago
      This is a surprisingly negative take, you should look a little further. Microsoft Research has done an incredible amount of high quality research. I've mostly read papers from them on programming languages, they have or did employ leading researchers behind C#, F#, Typescript (of course), as well as Haskell (Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow spent a long time there), F*, and Lean (built by Leonardo de Moura while at MSR). MSR's scope has been much broader than just languages, of course. You could look at their blog: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/ Or their list of publications: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publications/ Here's a (no longer updated, apparently) list of awards given to researchers at Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/awards-archive/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/awards-archive/ I've heard in interviews that MSR's culture is not what it used to be (like Bell Labs, maybe), but over time they've funded a ton of highly influential research.
• yard2010 2y ago
  Don't fall for it. They will find a way to let some powerful actors exploit the users for dimes.
• chefandy 2y ago
  The marketing is def working. I'm sure we'd be pretty depressed by some of the projects that didn't make the blog cut.
• rldjbpin 2y ago
  they've had a proven history of open-sourcing systems they engineered to power their services. cassandradb and (py)torch comes to mind.
• thenoblesunfish 2y ago
  Is there a peer reviewed paper associated with this, or just a blog post?