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Comments here are surprising to me. I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either. But this is an unquestio

Comments here are surprising to me. I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either. But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think. Unless I’m missing something and am getting this whole situation wrong. Please let me know if I am.

kylecazar 2mo ago
Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle. I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.
- cataphract 2mo ago
  Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.
  - mcmcmc 2mo ago
    The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances
    - skohan 2mo ago
      Isn't this meta release kind of a counterexample to that?
    - chrsw 2mo ago
      We did this with manufacturing and industrial build outs over the last 4 decades or so. It worked out very well for capital, not well for labor. One could make the argument we can do the same for AI. Let China build the models and we capture the value somewhere in the layers above. I think that’s a terrible idea but financially it makes just as much sense as offshoring labor and manufacturing, if not more.
      - TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
        Manufacturing was never strategic. (That was irony, by the way.)
        ignoramous 2mo ago
        > That was irony Sarcasm or irony?
    - DrewADesign 2mo ago
      So, if they got ahead of us by whatever arbitrary measure someone pretends is objective, then suddenly our stuff… what… stops working? Does it say somewhere in the big book of AI rules that the first entity to beat the US AI companies would be in charge now, and we’d have to stop doing our own research and development and start using their shit exclusively? I don’t get the argument.
  - mrDmrTmrJ 2mo ago
    If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute? I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment. If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?
    - munk-a 2mo ago
      > If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.? It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow. My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.
    - makingstuffs 2mo ago
      Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?
    - failbuffer 2mo ago
      Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?
    - sanderjd 2mo ago
      What I think is that something the "exponential scaling to AGI" thesis pays too little attention to is resource constraints, and that this is the answer to your question. What will happen if it becomes difficult to sustain the investment of resources necessary to continuously train newer and better models is that the s-curve will start to inflect toward plateau, just like any other technology.
    - nradov 2mo ago
      That's a non sequitur. While the frontier LLMs are quite useful for many tasks there's no reliable evidence that scaling them up will ever produce a true AGI. More likely some other fundamental research breakthroughs will be needed, and those breakthroughs won't necessarily come from the current leading companies. I doubt that more money would be necessary or even helpful in that.
- waffletower 2mo ago
  While Zuck's contributions are probably overwhelmingly more negative than positive, Meta initiated both pytorch and llama which have had profoundly positive effects on AI research. And I really am not a fan of python :D
  - bigfishrunning 2mo ago
    Yes, but have those positive effects on AI research had a positive or negative effect on society? I guess time will tell
  - jmalicki 2mo ago
    pytorch is really mostly C++ after all, you don't have to use it with python. Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"
  - numpad0 2mo ago
    Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak, and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it? He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths.
    - magicalist 2mo ago
      > Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak No > and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it and no. Meta legal was issuing DMCA notices within days (so, plenty of time for execs, including Zuckerberg, to sign off on, or even propose, that strategy). > He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths. Does he? I can't seem to recall any particular crucial moments that revealed any underlying character there.
    - dragonwriter 2mo ago
      > Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak No. GPT-2, I think, was the first, four(ish) years before Llama, and there were a bunch in between GPT-2 and the Llama leak and later open release. The Llama leak was a substantial leap forward in capacity for local LLMs, but not the first, and it wasn’t open. The open licensed release was Llama 2 several months after the Llama leak.
- pjmlp 2mo ago
  If only folks did the same in regards to React adoption....
- baron816 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - windexh8er 2mo ago
    The "legacy media" is not a single individual who has total control of billions of dollars in capital to do whatever they want at the drop of a hat. You're conflating two very different issues. Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.
    - baron816 2mo ago
      Rupert Murdoch absolutely is capable of doing all that. He’s absolutely done far more harm globally than Zuckerberg.
      - windexh8er 2mo ago
        The concentration of media target for Murdoch (now: Lachlan Murdoch) is nowhere near Zuck's reach. Meta has 3.6B daily active users vs 1.5-3M viewers in Fox / primetime. Has he done more harm as through the perspective of time? Probably, but you'd be kidding yourself if you don't think Zuckerberg will be the more evil of the two if he exits control around the same age as Murdoch. Zuckerberg is only getting started and he's capable of destroying Murdoch if he so chooses. We know that the Murdoch empire knows they are losing ground as well - which is why they need to acquire a platform like Roku [0]. But honestly the legacy of Murdoch may end up closer aligned to Succession than the empire that Zuck has under his finger. Also Zuckerberg has global influence that's unrivaled, Murdoch has contributed all of his efforts to erosion within, mostly, NAM. TL;DR - Zuck is worth 9-10x more than Murdoch ($211B vs $21B) and reaches 20-30x more people (3.6B vs 3M) on the daily. A 20% drawdown of Meta swallows TWO Murdoch empires with a hell of a lot of spare change. [0] https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and-who-survives-the-shakeup/ https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and...
- timClicks 2mo ago
  Facebook used the same strategy to compete with Google Maps. The company became one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap, which everyone has benefited from downstream.
- alex1138 2mo ago
  I can't get over his negative externalities Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank He's seen with suspicion and rightly so Edit: and the fact his site doesn't work. Posts don't work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
- godelski 2mo ago
  > it's not out of principle. There's a bunch of influencers who go help struggling people. I'm certain the majority of them aren't doing it out of principle, but at the end of the day people still get helped. I'd certainly rather things be done out of principle, but depending on what question you're concerned with that might not matter. There's also a clear hierarchy, but motivations are distinct from effect. The inverse of this is that lots of harm has happened from people with the best of motivations. I'd wager most evil in the world is created by men who would see themselves as good. With Zuckerberg I think it isn't too hard. Clearly this is a business move, not a moral one. The motivation is wrong, BUT the effect is good. I think more open source models is better for the world. Closed source is also a business move and limits innovation as well as prevents people from interrogating safety. But there's valid arguments on either end. My point more is that we can be nuanced. We should be nuanced. The world isn't black and white. The people making these decisions are neither demons nor gods and shouldn't be treated as such. My biggest fear is that if we resort to criticizing no matter what then those in power will just learn to ignore us. If they can do no good and only do wrong then there's no reason for them to do good (besides morals, but let's not pretend that's enough, even if it should be)
  - anigbrowl 2mo ago
    There's a bunch of influencers who go help struggling people. I'm certain the majority of them aren't doing it out of principle, but at the end of the day people still get helped. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's like a lot of other things on the internet, with a bimodal distribution between people who get helped a lot ('Sir Hype surprises homeless former billionaire with a MILLION DOLLARS!') with many other similarly deserving people getting nothing. I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place. Besides the fact that these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor (and the near certainty that some of these professional philanthropists will later turn out to devils LARPing as angels), it also makes the determination of moral worthiness turn on the public's fickle opinion about whether the recipient is sufficiently beautiful/ ugly/ unlucky/ desperate/ degraded enough to qualify. Charitable undertakings involving cameras are always a bit suspect.
- danielrhodes 2mo ago
  Open models are a good thing. OpenAI was open until it became obvious that being open was not going to pay for training costs and wouldn't help them get a competitive edge. I'd bet that if Meta gets to a place where their model is in a similar position, they will also become more closed. But right now, Meta is open because that is what weakens and creates the most contrast with the other AI labs. It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.
- pc86 2mo ago
  You can tell how intellectually honest someone is when someone they hate makes a good point. It's possible to dislike (or even hate) Zuckerberg and understand that he's making a good point for selfish motives, and still want that thing as well. Instead you see several comments here twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain how ackshually open models are bad now. I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because it helps everyone.
  - 24t 2mo ago
    The model release is nice. I won't sing their praises for it because that plays into the long term strategy of a company I despise. Is that intellectually dishonest?
    - pc86 2mo ago
      It depends on if you can say things like "it is good they are supporting this" or "I'm glad they're doing this" or "good for them" without having to couch it in a bunch of stuff about how terrible they are.
      - magicalist 2mo ago
        > It depends on if you can say things like "it is good they are supporting this" or "I'm glad they're doing this" or "good for them" without having to couch it in a bunch of stuff about how terrible they are. That is a weird definition of intellectual honesty. If you hold both of those opinions, what's wrong with stating them both? If the answer has to do with the rhetorical effect, that seems a lot harder to justify as intellectual dishonesty, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
  - tqi 2mo ago
    >the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals TBF, I think the same can be said for something like Apple's "commitment" to privacy, in that their own ads business never took off so they leaned into their edge over Google.
  - Foobar8568 2mo ago
- jamesrr39 2mo ago
  > he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle To be fair Meta/Facebook does have quite a strong open source history; React (Native), PyTorch, Btrfs, zstd, etc. It didn't just start here with AI models.
- mcbuilder 2mo ago
  Yeah, I feel like we bigly lose to China if we don't.
- strtok 2mo ago
  Unless weights are being manipulated to make the model respond in a way that favors the owners.
- razster 2mo ago
  This can be said for a lot of different matters. Reading this gave me some Déjà vu vibes. My personal take, I don't see this as a good thing. Yes I dislike META with a passion and will refuse to use this model or allow it in any of my workflows. So I guess I may never know, which I'm ok with that.
- lukeschlather 2mo ago
  The "commoditize his closed rivals" line of reasoning doesn't make sense to me. That doesn't sound like a business decision, it sounds potentially spiteful? But that's ascribing malice to what could just as easily be explained by good faith. Meta doesn't really offer any profit-making AI product, so I don't understand what commoditizing it buys them in this narrative. You could argue they rely on AI and so want it to be a cheap commodity - but that is not harming their rivals, that is just a different way of stating that Meta is engaging in something that enables people to collectively work for mutual benefit, which is not a nefarious plot against rivals, it is laudable cooperative behavior.
  - blablablerg 2mo ago
    To ascribe good faith here to Zuckerberg is quite the leap considering his history. Why are his main products basically walled gardens then? It is a business decision to open source his models, because he has been behind the curve from the start. Do you believe if he had chatGPT, he would open source/weight it? I don't think so, he would treat it like Instagram. The point is, AI/LLMs are seen as the next frontier. If one of the closed ones becomes dominant, then that company can use its user base to attack Zuckerberg's platforms. That google failed with google+, does not mean the next competitor will. A telling sign is how he integrated his AI into whatsapp. It seems out of place to me to have an LLM integrated into whatsapp, but he desperately wants a part of the AI cake.
- starkshift 2mo ago
  The essential principle of free market economics is that good things may be done for selfish reasons and that this in itself is actually good
- deaton 2mo ago
  If everyone did good things for selfish reasons, the world would be a much better place than it is.
conception 2mo ago
I think it’s perfectly fine to call out people who intentionally harm children for money out in public in every possible situation.
A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
> But this is an unquestionably good thing right? Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.
- lukan 2mo ago
  "This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now." Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for. But I can and do still welcome this move here.
  - diegolas 2mo ago
    it's not that deep, they wan you scrolling the most time possible. it's absolutely escapable tho, literally not required for any activity whatsoever.
    - lukan 2mo ago
      Yeah, but if he can buy a bit of political power/more money on the side by promise to influence certain trends, I doubt he would say no on ethical grounds. (Just for the fear of whistleblowers I guess)
    - butlike 2mo ago
      Totally. The hard part is treating it like any other addiction. Time in absentia helps reduce the behavioral reinforcement. I don't even want to open Instagram anymore.
  - basch 2mo ago
    Intention might be giving too much credit. If attention seeking “give the people what they want” is the goal, it’s a completely headless out of control cobra, not sinister well thought out objectives to control society.
Yizahi 2mo ago
In short - this is Mark deliberately lying in a way which requires a page of difficult text to explain, which hardly anyone would read and so Mark bets that a majority of the people who will see his claim will believe him. And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...
baggachipz 2mo ago
I think this approach they're taking is to compensate for their inability to compete; they're cynically claiming to support the open-source ecosystem when it's convenient for their marketing. This move reeks of a future rugpull, as Meta is wont to do.
nozzlegear 2mo ago
Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point. http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606 http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...
mitthrowaway2 2mo ago
It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.
dbspin 2mo ago
I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them. If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it. A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
- bigyabai 2mo ago
  > the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them. These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.
  - dbspin 2mo ago
    That's not the case at all. You can regulate and audit a small number of players. To a great extent at least. You cannot even theoretically regulate local models. Hell I've got a jailbroken Qwen 3.5 running on my mac studio that has no guardrails at all.
    - nradov 2mo ago
      And that's fine because no guardrails are needed.
paxys 2mo ago
It could be a good thing but I wouldn’t rush to say “unquestionably”. There is a long history of mega corps hijacking open source and open standards for their own ends and leaving the space infinitely worse.
eddielement 2mo ago
I mean, I can question if this is a good thing. Here's a quote from Zuck's blog post: "Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less." Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!
- TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
  That reads like it was written by a PR company, or at the very least by a team of professional speechwriters. It has all the tells of political rhetoric. I have zero faith that Zuckerberg went anywhere near these words. It's possible he may not even have set their general direction, beyond "We need a distraction from our court cases. Something that will harm OpenAI and Anthropic would be great."
thefourthchime 2mo ago
All of these companies are just as cutthroat and want to win as the others. But if your name's not OpenAI and Anthropic, you go on the high horse and say everything should be open source. However, if you had a closed model that was winning, I'm sure that's not the argument you would make.
j45 2mo ago
Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see? Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
j45 2mo ago
Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see? Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now. Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.
a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
> The more open source software out there the better. Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?
- alfalfasprout 2mo ago
  The weights are open, the training data obviously isn't. But a key thing you can do with open models is fine tune them. So while they may not be SOTA at everything, they can become SOTA at your particular business use case.
- subygan 2mo ago
  do you have a $100 mil worth of compute to train your own version of this? I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    It's just about as open source as OSX, which can be downloaded zero cost here: http://updates-http.cdn-apple.com/2019/cert/061-39476-20191023-48f365f4-0015-4c41-9f44-39d3d2aca067/InstallOS.dmg http://updates-http.cdn-apple.com/2019/cert/061-39476-201910... I love that Apple made OSX open source.
    - subygan 2mo ago
      we're calling it openweights now. what is a logical push to have a completely new paradigm be compared with traditional software binaries?
      - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        Check the phrase I quoted. Anyways, I guess OSX is open assembly?
verdverm 2mo ago
It's not always "unquestionably" good, first because nothing should be unquestionable, second llm models have a very short shelf life, third it comes from Zuck who is an the center of the oligarchy, so questions very much should be asked Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back
reducesuffering 2mo ago
> But this is an unquestionably good thing right? We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons? This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
- dismalaf 2mo ago
  > We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons? Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.
  - reducesuffering 2mo ago
    In 2015, about a year before ever founding OpenAI, Sam Altman wrote: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could." https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
    - dismalaf 2mo ago
      I mean, Terminator the movie came out in the 80's... I'm sure if LLM-based AIs posed this kind of threat the government would quietly force all the vendors to cooperate and slow down. Google, MS, IBM are all government contractors. Meta seems close to the Trump admin too. Yet it's only the VC-funded labs raising the alarm.
- aeve890 2mo ago
  >We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator. It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.
runjake 2mo ago
If Zuck gets his way, he gets more control, maybe he gets significant control of the market. Then, he'll probably close his models, if the past is any indication, which leads to bad results. Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse. But yeah, open models is a great concept.
- alex1138 2mo ago
  Zuck's DNA is clear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4
mikeweiss 2mo ago
I thought open model != open source?
- CharlesW 2mo ago
  Yes, and even calling them "open weights" is very generous considering the license restrictions. The Financial Times puts "open" in quotes for good reason.
  - meric_ 2mo ago
    It's apache 2.0. Not exactly restrictive?
neonstatic 2mo ago
[dead]
dev_l1x_be 2mo ago
Evil people can do things that look good on the surface. He probably has no skin in this game just collecting free karma points.
- ant6n 2mo ago
  As they say, even Hitler built the autobahn.
- delecti 2mo ago
  Facebook hasn't had much success getting people to use their hosted AI, so they're making those models free instead, to kneecap other companies who are trying to get paying customers for their own hosted AI. This gets people to ask themselves things like: how many months of Claude Max it would take to pay for hardware to run Muse Glimmer (the Meta model in question) offline?
- ninth_ant 2mo ago
  I can guarantee that he has almost zero interest in “karma points”. I worked for FB years ago and that is not how he sees the world or sets direction did the company. Almost certainly this is part of some grandiose bet which could have a chance to pay off massively in the future (AGI or similar), or a way to prevent an expensive dependency.
ElProlactin 2mo ago
If you don't trust his intentions, how can you trust anything he does? Just take the opening of this post: > We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. > The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone? > We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety. I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive. So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?
- gregw2 2mo ago
  Is there any reason Zuckerberg/Meta should get huge lawsuits and criticism for addictive design and say, Pinchai/Google/Youtube should not? Not a troll question, just wondering.
popalchemist 2mo ago
It's the who, not the what.
jstummbillig 2mo ago
The thing that makes ist questionable is the dishonesty. It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. If this was something that was dear to them on principle, there are plenty of things that they could have done differently with FB, Insta or WA (to this day). So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their relatively bad stuff away and play the high and mighty game, because that's all they can do to get returns. Not a great look – and I would expect that to last about as long as they can't actually monetize their stuff more effectively.
- jayd16 2mo ago
  > It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things? I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.
  - txru 2mo ago
    I first think of React's re-licensing from Apache, where under the new license if you sued Facebook for patent infringement for any reason, you would lose the patent grant to use React. React was already quite prominent in web technologies, but that license pointed a loaded gun at any business smaller than Facebook who wanted to use React. They opened it up to its current license, MIT, as the backlash built.
deleted 2mo ago
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jmyeet 2mo ago
There's a saying "open source is for losers". What it means is that winners in a market don't want open source. The losers in a market push for it to commodify it eliminate the winner's advantage. Now some of these tech companies open source various libraries but none of it is core to their business. It's marketing, essentially. Or they're trying to get free labor from the community. Google had protocol buffers and Stubby, for example. Facebook had no open source equivalent and didn't have Google's resources so they created Thrift and open sourced it. Given this, many people, myself included, take Meta releasing open weight models as conceding defeat. They're unable to compete with Google, Anthropic or OpenAI. Their failures in attracting and retaining top AI talent backs this up. So what you're seeing is people just piling onto Zuckerberg because he seems to have no idea of what to do with Meta. The Metaverse was a $70B+ disaster. Note that Chinese labs don't fit this model because the Chinese government wants to commodify models as a national security interest.
- kriro 2mo ago
  Where does this supposed saying come from? All I hear is PostgreSQL is the database intelligent people use, Git or GTFO and I don't even know what a closed source programming language is. Apache and nginx, Linux, DNS infrastructure. In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?
  - jmyeet 2mo ago
    To be clear, the saying is about how companies treat open source, not the intrinsic value of open source to end users (individuals or companies). I'm very much a fan. The point is that profit-seeking only push for open source when they're losing.
sanderjd 2mo ago
I don't know about "unquestionably", but yes, I think this is a better path than the proprietary models.
nkrisc 2mo ago
Because there is so much good he could do right now with what he and Meta already have, but they don’t, because it will lose them money. For example, hiring more people to moderate content on Facebook and stop ads featuring CSAM from being displayed. Billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by being altruistic. If they say something they’re doing is good for the world, you should be looking at how it will be good for them, because that’s why they’re really doing it. Will it incidentally do some good for others? Perhaps. Is it a net positive? We’ll see because there’s precious little we can do to stop them from doing whatever they want.
scoofy 2mo ago
We support an open model ecosystem (because we failed to produce a successful closed model).
lrvick 2mo ago
Zuck built an empire to sell democracy to the highest bidder and to damage the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money. We must never let anyone forget that for a second. That said, he is also a powerful enemy of our enemies, so I do not mind taking the win. Anthropic and OpenAIs closed approach to AI is likely to cause way more harm to the world than Zuck ever did. Open weight is not enough though. We need actually open training models with published searchable training data like AI2 does. Either we all get access to private, transparent, and accountable superintelligence, or no one should.
cush 2mo ago
It might be true if it wasn't coming from Meta, but it is coming from Meta. Intelligence is a function of the model and compute. Meta has the capital required to put together world-class compute, but they can't attract the talent required to build world-class models. Given their history of building addictive software to harvest and sell user data for profit, they're the last company we need spearheading how models should be regulated. Nobody trusts Meta to do this.
- Cookingboy 2mo ago
  Sure you can doubt the motivation of the speaker, but remember the validity of the argument itself is orthogonal to the speaker’s identity.
  - sscaryterry 2mo ago
    Its perfectly valid to question the intent though. Yes, open models are great. Why does Meta prefer that? Because they lost the race to the top, so they'd rather level the playing field by eliminating the game entirely.
  - bevr1337 2mo ago
    > the validity of the argument itself is orthogonal to the speaker’s identity. How did you arrive at this conclusion? Are you actually the Big Bad Wolf? That sounds like something the Big Bad Wolf would say.
    - aesbetic 2mo ago
      using an ad hominem to attack the concept of ad hominem lol
      - cush 2mo ago
        That’s the joke, friend. The idea that we can possibly ignore the fact that this push for opening AI models is being pushed by one of the richest people on the planet, who made his wealth by providing free services in exchange for attention and depression, is insane
sojournerc 2mo ago
Maybe it's good, but I'm going to keep questioning. They are vying for market share. If they cornered it I doubt they would be so open. Morals should not be conditional
s0ss 2mo ago
This is not open source; you mean open weight. These models are the antithesis of FOSS. Is it better than hosted models from other big labs? Yes, but not by much from a freedom perspective. especially considering the texts these were trained on. Grumble grumble, these details matter.
- losvedir 2mo ago
  Genuine question, but why does it matter? It seems to me the vast majority of the benefit comes in the weights. Then you can self host, quantize, finetune, ablate, etc. What does having the original data get you beyond that?
  - s0ss 2mo ago
    open source gives you freedom to read/edit/learn from the source code. Open weights don't let you read/edit/learn from the source. open wights have more in common with traditional binary distribution of software, ala closed source software. Only in this specific context has the entire meaning of the words totally inverted. I can run lots of binaries on my computer that don't have source available, they are not open source. These words matter.
ben_w 2mo ago
> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. I say no to both. Of the things we've made on purpose, but excluding where we were actually trying to make them opaque like e.g. cryptography, a trained artificial neural network is the most difficult thing to understand the inner workings of. This makes it a complete pain to even evaluate if one model is better or worse than another for your needs, so we have to mostly outsource these to other people's rankings and hope the score on ARC-AGI-3 or τ-bench or DeepSWE v1.1 or BioMysteryBench or whatever, actually corresponds to something we care about. Which it might do kinda but on the other hand a high score may turn out to be the curse of Goodhart. Also, as with the Chinese models and the social media feed algorithms, the only way to tell if there's some systemic flaw in it is by analysing the aggregate outcomes. It is claimed (I can't read the laws myself*) that the Chinese government requires models to support the government's worldview about e.g. Tiananmen Square; and we have seen examples of Grok glazing Musk in amusingly stupid ways; so I fully expect something similar from Zuckerberg, e.g. requiring the model to glaze Meta products or propagandise for things Zuckerberg wants as a billionaire. * every time I try to illustrate how mediocre Google Translate is from English to Chinese, the result is so bad that one of the replies is someone telling me the Chinese example I give is borderline gibberish. Also, even if I could actually read it, I'm not a lawyer.
drTobiasFunke 2mo ago
Open weight models are not open software. Its better than closed blackbox models sold by Sam and Mario, but Zuck supporting open weight models when he (and other big boys) hoards all the compute required to run any model, including open weight models only shows that he realized he cant beat Sam and Mario, so wants their leverage to go away.
madrox 2mo ago
It is dangerous to admire or despise anyone for who they are; it's ok to say someone did something good or bad.
etempleton 2mo ago
This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has espoused the benefit of openness and transparency and how that would create a better society. I get this is a bit different, but the language and sentiment are close enough. Facebook and Instagram are now so closed you cannot view a business page without an account. I think it sold fair to recognize open today does not mean open tomorrow. They want to acquire users and build a platform and that means doing something different than the competition.
- alex1138 2mo ago
  'Closed because scraping' is a big problem of hypocrisy Let's say in a pretend world where Facebook gives a shit about anything (so, they combat marketplace scams, they don't randomly ban users, they faithfully show you posts from friends, they don't extort businesses) they want to protect privacy. So they close the site off, because scraping means there's no privacy. If I scrape your profile and export it to any number of sites, then it's not private. Ergo: closed. Sign up to view things, so we know who you are But of course in the actual world that's not what they do. They purely want to do this to get more people to sign up so they 'have more users'. You can tell, because of who MZ is. You can tell because of how aggressive their own AI scrapers are on other sites. I've even heard they made a tool for Myspace that would enable you to transfer your contacts over to Facebook - but not the other way around
giancarlostoro 2mo ago
I'll always opt for giving companies / people praise for doing the right thing regardless of how infrequently they do so. I hope Mark Zuckerberg keeps open sourcing models.
asveikau 2mo ago
If you've seen Zuckerberg for long enough you'll see he doesn't hold any position for all that long. Remember they renamed the entire company for a product idea he basically abandoned. So if he does "the right thing" you can just wait, he'll give up on it pretty soon.
troupo 2mo ago
The company that pirated books [1], and is unconditionally opting in all their users into training their AI [2] is releasing "open" models. Awwwww. [1] 82 TB of books https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... [2] Here's a simple 12-step manusl process to opt-out on Facebook https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html
nylonstrung 2mo ago
I think it's positive and at the very least it's a force countervailing the push to legislate or ban open models in the US If they were able to make a leading closed model would they be doing it though? It seems like they read the room and saw that this is the only way they can have relevance within LLMs
Opocio 2mo ago
Not if you are worried about the existential threat AI poses. Having easily available AI makes it hardier to regulate, control and limit until we find a way to align AI. Harder to control is a good thing for most technologies, but not for all. A weak analogy is nuclear weapons. if Meta would release and open source some tech that would magically make extremely easy and cheap for everyone to build a nuke, it would not be a positive for society.
sharts 2mo ago
Did the good thing come from and for good intentions? Probably not. It's a strategic move. And merely words. Let the results speak after all is said AND done.
deleted 2mo ago
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ncr100 2mo ago
Ethics can guide us here: The trade/net is: 1) bad company does good things.. 2) further reinforces toxic Ends Justify The Means thinking.
charles_f 2mo ago
It's likely a good thing, and I don't like attacks ad ominem. But also there comes a point where the sum total of what you did becomes negative enough that you lose the benefit of the doubt. You're past redeemable, and anything you do becomes immediately suspicious. He could give his entire fortune to UNICEF and retire as a monk, I would still probably think this is part of a scheme. But yeah advocating for open source anything is a good thing, I guess. Ironic if you think about he's been fighting to keep FB's algorithms hidden.

kylecazar 2mo ago

Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle. I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

cataphract 2mo ago
Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.
- mcmcmc 2mo ago
  The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances
  - skohan 2mo ago
    Isn't this meta release kind of a counterexample to that?
  - chrsw 2mo ago
    We did this with manufacturing and industrial build outs over the last 4 decades or so. It worked out very well for capital, not well for labor. One could make the argument we can do the same for AI. Let China build the models and we capture the value somewhere in the layers above. I think that’s a terrible idea but financially it makes just as much sense as offshoring labor and manufacturing, if not more.
    - TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
      Manufacturing was never strategic. (That was irony, by the way.)
      - ignoramous 2mo ago
        > That was irony Sarcasm or irony?
  - DrewADesign 2mo ago
    So, if they got ahead of us by whatever arbitrary measure someone pretends is objective, then suddenly our stuff… what… stops working? Does it say somewhere in the big book of AI rules that the first entity to beat the US AI companies would be in charge now, and we’d have to stop doing our own research and development and start using their shit exclusively? I don’t get the argument.
- mrDmrTmrJ 2mo ago
  If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute? I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment. If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?
  - munk-a 2mo ago
    > If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.? It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow. My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.
  - makingstuffs 2mo ago
    Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?
  - failbuffer 2mo ago
    Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?
  - sanderjd 2mo ago
    What I think is that something the "exponential scaling to AGI" thesis pays too little attention to is resource constraints, and that this is the answer to your question. What will happen if it becomes difficult to sustain the investment of resources necessary to continuously train newer and better models is that the s-curve will start to inflect toward plateau, just like any other technology.
  - nradov 2mo ago
    That's a non sequitur. While the frontier LLMs are quite useful for many tasks there's no reliable evidence that scaling them up will ever produce a true AGI. More likely some other fundamental research breakthroughs will be needed, and those breakthroughs won't necessarily come from the current leading companies. I doubt that more money would be necessary or even helpful in that.
waffletower 2mo ago
While Zuck's contributions are probably overwhelmingly more negative than positive, Meta initiated both pytorch and llama which have had profoundly positive effects on AI research. And I really am not a fan of python :D
- bigfishrunning 2mo ago
  Yes, but have those positive effects on AI research had a positive or negative effect on society? I guess time will tell
- jmalicki 2mo ago
  pytorch is really mostly C++ after all, you don't have to use it with python. Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"
- numpad0 2mo ago
  Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak, and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it? He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths.
  - magicalist 2mo ago
    > Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak No > and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it and no. Meta legal was issuing DMCA notices within days (so, plenty of time for execs, including Zuckerberg, to sign off on, or even propose, that strategy). > He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths. Does he? I can't seem to recall any particular crucial moments that revealed any underlying character there.
  - dragonwriter 2mo ago
    > Wasn't LLaMA or Llama 2 the first ever open weight LLM through a leak No. GPT-2, I think, was the first, four(ish) years before Llama, and there were a bunch in between GPT-2 and the Llama leak and later open release. The Llama leak was a substantial leap forward in capacity for local LLMs, but not the first, and it wasn’t open. The open licensed release was Llama 2 several months after the Llama leak.
pjmlp 2mo ago
If only folks did the same in regards to React adoption....
baron816 2mo ago
[flagged]
- windexh8er 2mo ago
  The "legacy media" is not a single individual who has total control of billions of dollars in capital to do whatever they want at the drop of a hat. You're conflating two very different issues. Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.
  - baron816 2mo ago
    Rupert Murdoch absolutely is capable of doing all that. He’s absolutely done far more harm globally than Zuckerberg.
    - windexh8er 2mo ago
      The concentration of media target for Murdoch (now: Lachlan Murdoch) is nowhere near Zuck's reach. Meta has 3.6B daily active users vs 1.5-3M viewers in Fox / primetime. Has he done more harm as through the perspective of time? Probably, but you'd be kidding yourself if you don't think Zuckerberg will be the more evil of the two if he exits control around the same age as Murdoch. Zuckerberg is only getting started and he's capable of destroying Murdoch if he so chooses. We know that the Murdoch empire knows they are losing ground as well - which is why they need to acquire a platform like Roku [0]. But honestly the legacy of Murdoch may end up closer aligned to Succession than the empire that Zuck has under his finger. Also Zuckerberg has global influence that's unrivaled, Murdoch has contributed all of his efforts to erosion within, mostly, NAM. TL;DR - Zuck is worth 9-10x more than Murdoch ($211B vs $21B) and reaches 20-30x more people (3.6B vs 3M) on the daily. A 20% drawdown of Meta swallows TWO Murdoch empires with a hell of a lot of spare change. [0] https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and-who-survives-the-shakeup/ https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and...
timClicks 2mo ago
Facebook used the same strategy to compete with Google Maps. The company became one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap, which everyone has benefited from downstream.
alex1138 2mo ago
I can't get over his negative externalities Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank He's seen with suspicion and rightly so Edit: and the fact his site doesn't work. Posts don't work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
godelski 2mo ago
> it's not out of principle. There's a bunch of influencers who go help struggling people. I'm certain the majority of them aren't doing it out of principle, but at the end of the day people still get helped. I'd certainly rather things be done out of principle, but depending on what question you're concerned with that might not matter. There's also a clear hierarchy, but motivations are distinct from effect. The inverse of this is that lots of harm has happened from people with the best of motivations. I'd wager most evil in the world is created by men who would see themselves as good. With Zuckerberg I think it isn't too hard. Clearly this is a business move, not a moral one. The motivation is wrong, BUT the effect is good. I think more open source models is better for the world. Closed source is also a business move and limits innovation as well as prevents people from interrogating safety. But there's valid arguments on either end. My point more is that we can be nuanced. We should be nuanced. The world isn't black and white. The people making these decisions are neither demons nor gods and shouldn't be treated as such. My biggest fear is that if we resort to criticizing no matter what then those in power will just learn to ignore us. If they can do no good and only do wrong then there's no reason for them to do good (besides morals, but let's not pretend that's enough, even if it should be)
- anigbrowl 2mo ago
  There's a bunch of influencers who go help struggling people. I'm certain the majority of them aren't doing it out of principle, but at the end of the day people still get helped. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's like a lot of other things on the internet, with a bimodal distribution between people who get helped a lot ('Sir Hype surprises homeless former billionaire with a MILLION DOLLARS!') with many other similarly deserving people getting nothing. I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place. Besides the fact that these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor (and the near certainty that some of these professional philanthropists will later turn out to devils LARPing as angels), it also makes the determination of moral worthiness turn on the public's fickle opinion about whether the recipient is sufficiently beautiful/ ugly/ unlucky/ desperate/ degraded enough to qualify. Charitable undertakings involving cameras are always a bit suspect.
danielrhodes 2mo ago
Open models are a good thing. OpenAI was open until it became obvious that being open was not going to pay for training costs and wouldn't help them get a competitive edge. I'd bet that if Meta gets to a place where their model is in a similar position, they will also become more closed. But right now, Meta is open because that is what weakens and creates the most contrast with the other AI labs. It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.
pc86 2mo ago
You can tell how intellectually honest someone is when someone they hate makes a good point. It's possible to dislike (or even hate) Zuckerberg and understand that he's making a good point for selfish motives, and still want that thing as well. Instead you see several comments here twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain how ackshually open models are bad now. I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because it helps everyone.
- 24t 2mo ago
  The model release is nice. I won't sing their praises for it because that plays into the long term strategy of a company I despise. Is that intellectually dishonest?
  - pc86 2mo ago
    It depends on if you can say things like "it is good they are supporting this" or "I'm glad they're doing this" or "good for them" without having to couch it in a bunch of stuff about how terrible they are.
    - magicalist 2mo ago
      > It depends on if you can say things like "it is good they are supporting this" or "I'm glad they're doing this" or "good for them" without having to couch it in a bunch of stuff about how terrible they are. That is a weird definition of intellectual honesty. If you hold both of those opinions, what's wrong with stating them both? If the answer has to do with the rhetorical effect, that seems a lot harder to justify as intellectual dishonesty, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
- tqi 2mo ago
  >the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals TBF, I think the same can be said for something like Apple's "commitment" to privacy, in that their own ads business never took off so they leaned into their edge over Google.
- Foobar8568 2mo ago
jamesrr39 2mo ago
> he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle To be fair Meta/Facebook does have quite a strong open source history; React (Native), PyTorch, Btrfs, zstd, etc. It didn't just start here with AI models.
mcbuilder 2mo ago
Yeah, I feel like we bigly lose to China if we don't.
strtok 2mo ago
Unless weights are being manipulated to make the model respond in a way that favors the owners.
razster 2mo ago
This can be said for a lot of different matters. Reading this gave me some Déjà vu vibes. My personal take, I don't see this as a good thing. Yes I dislike META with a passion and will refuse to use this model or allow it in any of my workflows. So I guess I may never know, which I'm ok with that.
lukeschlather 2mo ago
The "commoditize his closed rivals" line of reasoning doesn't make sense to me. That doesn't sound like a business decision, it sounds potentially spiteful? But that's ascribing malice to what could just as easily be explained by good faith. Meta doesn't really offer any profit-making AI product, so I don't understand what commoditizing it buys them in this narrative. You could argue they rely on AI and so want it to be a cheap commodity - but that is not harming their rivals, that is just a different way of stating that Meta is engaging in something that enables people to collectively work for mutual benefit, which is not a nefarious plot against rivals, it is laudable cooperative behavior.
- blablablerg 2mo ago
  To ascribe good faith here to Zuckerberg is quite the leap considering his history. Why are his main products basically walled gardens then? It is a business decision to open source his models, because he has been behind the curve from the start. Do you believe if he had chatGPT, he would open source/weight it? I don't think so, he would treat it like Instagram. The point is, AI/LLMs are seen as the next frontier. If one of the closed ones becomes dominant, then that company can use its user base to attack Zuckerberg's platforms. That google failed with google+, does not mean the next competitor will. A telling sign is how he integrated his AI into whatsapp. It seems out of place to me to have an LLM integrated into whatsapp, but he desperately wants a part of the AI cake.
starkshift 2mo ago
The essential principle of free market economics is that good things may be done for selfish reasons and that this in itself is actually good
deaton 2mo ago
If everyone did good things for selfish reasons, the world would be a much better place than it is.

conception 2mo ago

I think it’s perfectly fine to call out people who intentionally harm children for money out in public in every possible situation.

A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right? Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.

lukan 2mo ago
"This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now." Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for. But I can and do still welcome this move here.
- diegolas 2mo ago
  it's not that deep, they wan you scrolling the most time possible. it's absolutely escapable tho, literally not required for any activity whatsoever.
  - lukan 2mo ago
    Yeah, but if he can buy a bit of political power/more money on the side by promise to influence certain trends, I doubt he would say no on ethical grounds. (Just for the fear of whistleblowers I guess)
  - butlike 2mo ago
    Totally. The hard part is treating it like any other addiction. Time in absentia helps reduce the behavioral reinforcement. I don't even want to open Instagram anymore.
- basch 2mo ago
  Intention might be giving too much credit. If attention seeking “give the people what they want” is the goal, it’s a completely headless out of control cobra, not sinister well thought out objectives to control society.

Yizahi 2mo ago

In short - this is Mark deliberately lying in a way which requires a page of difficult text to explain, which hardly anyone would read and so Mark bets that a majority of the people who will see his claim will believe him. And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...

baggachipz 2mo ago

I think this approach they're taking is to compensate for their inability to compete; they're cynically claiming to support the open-source ecosystem when it's convenient for their marketing. This move reeks of a future rugpull, as Meta is wont to do.

nozzlegear 2mo ago

Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point. http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606 http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...

mitthrowaway2 2mo ago

It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.

dbspin 2mo ago

I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them. If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it. A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.

bigyabai 2mo ago
> the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them. These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.
- dbspin 2mo ago
  That's not the case at all. You can regulate and audit a small number of players. To a great extent at least. You cannot even theoretically regulate local models. Hell I've got a jailbroken Qwen 3.5 running on my mac studio that has no guardrails at all.
  - nradov 2mo ago
    And that's fine because no guardrails are needed.

paxys 2mo ago

It could be a good thing but I wouldn’t rush to say “unquestionably”. There is a long history of mega corps hijacking open source and open standards for their own ends and leaving the space infinitely worse.

eddielement 2mo ago

I mean, I can question if this is a good thing. Here's a quote from Zuck's blog post: "Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less." Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!

TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
That reads like it was written by a PR company, or at the very least by a team of professional speechwriters. It has all the tells of political rhetoric. I have zero faith that Zuckerberg went anywhere near these words. It's possible he may not even have set their general direction, beyond "We need a distraction from our court cases. Something that will harm OpenAI and Anthropic would be great."

thefourthchime 2mo ago

All of these companies are just as cutthroat and want to win as the others. But if your name's not OpenAI and Anthropic, you go on the high horse and say everything should be open source. However, if you had a closed model that was winning, I'm sure that's not the argument you would make.

j45 2mo ago

Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see? Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.

j45 2mo ago

Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see? Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now. Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago

> The more open source software out there the better. Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?

alfalfasprout 2mo ago
The weights are open, the training data obviously isn't. But a key thing you can do with open models is fine tune them. So while they may not be SOTA at everything, they can become SOTA at your particular business use case.
subygan 2mo ago
do you have a $100 mil worth of compute to train your own version of this? I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  It's just about as open source as OSX, which can be downloaded zero cost here: http://updates-http.cdn-apple.com/2019/cert/061-39476-20191023-48f365f4-0015-4c41-9f44-39d3d2aca067/InstallOS.dmg http://updates-http.cdn-apple.com/2019/cert/061-39476-201910... I love that Apple made OSX open source.
  - subygan 2mo ago
    we're calling it openweights now. what is a logical push to have a completely new paradigm be compared with traditional software binaries?
    - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      Check the phrase I quoted. Anyways, I guess OSX is open assembly?

verdverm 2mo ago

It's not always "unquestionably" good, first because nothing should be unquestionable, second llm models have a very short shelf life, third it comes from Zuck who is an the center of the oligarchy, so questions very much should be asked Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back

reducesuffering 2mo ago

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right? We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons? This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

dismalaf 2mo ago
> We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons? Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.
- reducesuffering 2mo ago
  In 2015, about a year before ever founding OpenAI, Sam Altman wrote: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could." https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
  - dismalaf 2mo ago
    I mean, Terminator the movie came out in the 80's... I'm sure if LLM-based AIs posed this kind of threat the government would quietly force all the vendors to cooperate and slow down. Google, MS, IBM are all government contractors. Meta seems close to the Trump admin too. Yet it's only the VC-funded labs raising the alarm.
aeve890 2mo ago
>We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator. It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.

runjake 2mo ago

If Zuck gets his way, he gets more control, maybe he gets significant control of the market. Then, he'll probably close his models, if the past is any indication, which leads to bad results. Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse. But yeah, open models is a great concept.

alex1138 2mo ago
Zuck's DNA is clear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4

mikeweiss 2mo ago

I thought open model != open source?

CharlesW 2mo ago
Yes, and even calling them "open weights" is very generous considering the license restrictions. The Financial Times puts "open" in quotes for good reason.
- meric_ 2mo ago
  It's apache 2.0. Not exactly restrictive?

neonstatic 2mo ago

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dev_l1x_be 2mo ago

Evil people can do things that look good on the surface. He probably has no skin in this game just collecting free karma points.

ant6n 2mo ago
As they say, even Hitler built the autobahn.
delecti 2mo ago
Facebook hasn't had much success getting people to use their hosted AI, so they're making those models free instead, to kneecap other companies who are trying to get paying customers for their own hosted AI. This gets people to ask themselves things like: how many months of Claude Max it would take to pay for hardware to run Muse Glimmer (the Meta model in question) offline?
ninth_ant 2mo ago
I can guarantee that he has almost zero interest in “karma points”. I worked for FB years ago and that is not how he sees the world or sets direction did the company. Almost certainly this is part of some grandiose bet which could have a chance to pay off massively in the future (AGI or similar), or a way to prevent an expensive dependency.

ElProlactin 2mo ago

If you don't trust his intentions, how can you trust anything he does? Just take the opening of this post: > We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. > The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone? > We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety. I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive. So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?

gregw2 2mo ago
Is there any reason Zuckerberg/Meta should get huge lawsuits and criticism for addictive design and say, Pinchai/Google/Youtube should not? Not a troll question, just wondering.

popalchemist 2mo ago

It's the who, not the what.

jstummbillig 2mo ago

The thing that makes ist questionable is the dishonesty. It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. If this was something that was dear to them on principle, there are plenty of things that they could have done differently with FB, Insta or WA (to this day). So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their relatively bad stuff away and play the high and mighty game, because that's all they can do to get returns. Not a great look – and I would expect that to last about as long as they can't actually monetize their stuff more effectively.

jayd16 2mo ago
> It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things? I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.
- txru 2mo ago
  I first think of React's re-licensing from Apache, where under the new license if you sued Facebook for patent infringement for any reason, you would lose the patent grant to use React. React was already quite prominent in web technologies, but that license pointed a loaded gun at any business smaller than Facebook who wanted to use React. They opened it up to its current license, MIT, as the backlash built.

deleted 2mo ago

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jmyeet 2mo ago

There's a saying "open source is for losers". What it means is that winners in a market don't want open source. The losers in a market push for it to commodify it eliminate the winner's advantage. Now some of these tech companies open source various libraries but none of it is core to their business. It's marketing, essentially. Or they're trying to get free labor from the community. Google had protocol buffers and Stubby, for example. Facebook had no open source equivalent and didn't have Google's resources so they created Thrift and open sourced it. Given this, many people, myself included, take Meta releasing open weight models as conceding defeat. They're unable to compete with Google, Anthropic or OpenAI. Their failures in attracting and retaining top AI talent backs this up. So what you're seeing is people just piling onto Zuckerberg because he seems to have no idea of what to do with Meta. The Metaverse was a $70B+ disaster. Note that Chinese labs don't fit this model because the Chinese government wants to commodify models as a national security interest.

kriro 2mo ago
Where does this supposed saying come from? All I hear is PostgreSQL is the database intelligent people use, Git or GTFO and I don't even know what a closed source programming language is. Apache and nginx, Linux, DNS infrastructure. In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?
- jmyeet 2mo ago
  To be clear, the saying is about how companies treat open source, not the intrinsic value of open source to end users (individuals or companies). I'm very much a fan. The point is that profit-seeking only push for open source when they're losing.

sanderjd 2mo ago

I don't know about "unquestionably", but yes, I think this is a better path than the proprietary models.

nkrisc 2mo ago

Because there is so much good he could do right now with what he and Meta already have, but they don’t, because it will lose them money. For example, hiring more people to moderate content on Facebook and stop ads featuring CSAM from being displayed. Billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by being altruistic. If they say something they’re doing is good for the world, you should be looking at how it will be good for them, because that’s why they’re really doing it. Will it incidentally do some good for others? Perhaps. Is it a net positive? We’ll see because there’s precious little we can do to stop them from doing whatever they want.

scoofy 2mo ago

We support an open model ecosystem (because we failed to produce a successful closed model).

lrvick 2mo ago

Zuck built an empire to sell democracy to the highest bidder and to damage the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money. We must never let anyone forget that for a second. That said, he is also a powerful enemy of our enemies, so I do not mind taking the win. Anthropic and OpenAIs closed approach to AI is likely to cause way more harm to the world than Zuck ever did. Open weight is not enough though. We need actually open training models with published searchable training data like AI2 does. Either we all get access to private, transparent, and accountable superintelligence, or no one should.

cush 2mo ago

It might be true if it wasn't coming from Meta, but it is coming from Meta. Intelligence is a function of the model and compute. Meta has the capital required to put together world-class compute, but they can't attract the talent required to build world-class models. Given their history of building addictive software to harvest and sell user data for profit, they're the last company we need spearheading how models should be regulated. Nobody trusts Meta to do this.

Cookingboy 2mo ago
Sure you can doubt the motivation of the speaker, but remember the validity of the argument itself is orthogonal to the speaker’s identity.
- sscaryterry 2mo ago
  Its perfectly valid to question the intent though. Yes, open models are great. Why does Meta prefer that? Because they lost the race to the top, so they'd rather level the playing field by eliminating the game entirely.
- bevr1337 2mo ago
  > the validity of the argument itself is orthogonal to the speaker’s identity. How did you arrive at this conclusion? Are you actually the Big Bad Wolf? That sounds like something the Big Bad Wolf would say.
  - aesbetic 2mo ago
    using an ad hominem to attack the concept of ad hominem lol
    - cush 2mo ago
      That’s the joke, friend. The idea that we can possibly ignore the fact that this push for opening AI models is being pushed by one of the richest people on the planet, who made his wealth by providing free services in exchange for attention and depression, is insane

sojournerc 2mo ago

Maybe it's good, but I'm going to keep questioning. They are vying for market share. If they cornered it I doubt they would be so open. Morals should not be conditional

s0ss 2mo ago

This is not open source; you mean open weight. These models are the antithesis of FOSS. Is it better than hosted models from other big labs? Yes, but not by much from a freedom perspective. especially considering the texts these were trained on. Grumble grumble, these details matter.

losvedir 2mo ago
Genuine question, but why does it matter? It seems to me the vast majority of the benefit comes in the weights. Then you can self host, quantize, finetune, ablate, etc. What does having the original data get you beyond that?
- s0ss 2mo ago
  open source gives you freedom to read/edit/learn from the source code. Open weights don't let you read/edit/learn from the source. open wights have more in common with traditional binary distribution of software, ala closed source software. Only in this specific context has the entire meaning of the words totally inverted. I can run lots of binaries on my computer that don't have source available, they are not open source. These words matter.

ben_w 2mo ago

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. I say no to both. Of the things we've made on purpose, but excluding where we were actually trying to make them opaque like e.g. cryptography, a trained artificial neural network is the most difficult thing to understand the inner workings of. This makes it a complete pain to even evaluate if one model is better or worse than another for your needs, so we have to mostly outsource these to other people's rankings and hope the score on ARC-AGI-3 or τ-bench or DeepSWE v1.1 or BioMysteryBench or whatever, actually corresponds to something we care about. Which it might do kinda but on the other hand a high score may turn out to be the curse of Goodhart. Also, as with the Chinese models and the social media feed algorithms, the only way to tell if there's some systemic flaw in it is by analysing the aggregate outcomes. It is claimed (I can't read the laws myself*) that the Chinese government requires models to support the government's worldview about e.g. Tiananmen Square; and we have seen examples of Grok glazing Musk in amusingly stupid ways; so I fully expect something similar from Zuckerberg, e.g. requiring the model to glaze Meta products or propagandise for things Zuckerberg wants as a billionaire. * every time I try to illustrate how mediocre Google Translate is from English to Chinese, the result is so bad that one of the replies is someone telling me the Chinese example I give is borderline gibberish. Also, even if I could actually read it, I'm not a lawyer.

drTobiasFunke 2mo ago

Open weight models are not open software. Its better than closed blackbox models sold by Sam and Mario, but Zuck supporting open weight models when he (and other big boys) hoards all the compute required to run any model, including open weight models only shows that he realized he cant beat Sam and Mario, so wants their leverage to go away.

madrox 2mo ago

It is dangerous to admire or despise anyone for who they are; it's ok to say someone did something good or bad.

etempleton 2mo ago

This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has espoused the benefit of openness and transparency and how that would create a better society. I get this is a bit different, but the language and sentiment are close enough. Facebook and Instagram are now so closed you cannot view a business page without an account. I think it sold fair to recognize open today does not mean open tomorrow. They want to acquire users and build a platform and that means doing something different than the competition.

alex1138 2mo ago
'Closed because scraping' is a big problem of hypocrisy Let's say in a pretend world where Facebook gives a shit about anything (so, they combat marketplace scams, they don't randomly ban users, they faithfully show you posts from friends, they don't extort businesses) they want to protect privacy. So they close the site off, because scraping means there's no privacy. If I scrape your profile and export it to any number of sites, then it's not private. Ergo: closed. Sign up to view things, so we know who you are But of course in the actual world that's not what they do. They purely want to do this to get more people to sign up so they 'have more users'. You can tell, because of who MZ is. You can tell because of how aggressive their own AI scrapers are on other sites. I've even heard they made a tool for Myspace that would enable you to transfer your contacts over to Facebook - but not the other way around

giancarlostoro 2mo ago

I'll always opt for giving companies / people praise for doing the right thing regardless of how infrequently they do so. I hope Mark Zuckerberg keeps open sourcing models.

asveikau 2mo ago

If you've seen Zuckerberg for long enough you'll see he doesn't hold any position for all that long. Remember they renamed the entire company for a product idea he basically abandoned. So if he does "the right thing" you can just wait, he'll give up on it pretty soon.

troupo 2mo ago

The company that pirated books [1], and is unconditionally opting in all their users into training their AI [2] is releasing "open" models. Awwwww. [1] 82 TB of books https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell... [2] Here's a simple 12-step manusl process to opt-out on Facebook https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html

nylonstrung 2mo ago

I think it's positive and at the very least it's a force countervailing the push to legislate or ban open models in the US If they were able to make a leading closed model would they be doing it though? It seems like they read the room and saw that this is the only way they can have relevance within LLMs

Opocio 2mo ago

Not if you are worried about the existential threat AI poses. Having easily available AI makes it hardier to regulate, control and limit until we find a way to align AI. Harder to control is a good thing for most technologies, but not for all. A weak analogy is nuclear weapons. if Meta would release and open source some tech that would magically make extremely easy and cheap for everyone to build a nuke, it would not be a positive for society.

sharts 2mo ago

Did the good thing come from and for good intentions? Probably not. It's a strategic move. And merely words. Let the results speak after all is said AND done.

deleted 2mo ago

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ncr100 2mo ago

Ethics can guide us here: The trade/net is: 1) bad company does good things.. 2) further reinforces toxic Ends Justify The Means thinking.

charles_f 2mo ago

It's likely a good thing, and I don't like attacks ad ominem. But also there comes a point where the sum total of what you did becomes negative enough that you lose the benefit of the doubt. You're past redeemable, and anything you do becomes immediately suspicious. He could give his entire fortune to UNICEF and retire as a monk, I would still probably think this is part of a scheme. But yeah advocating for open source anything is a good thing, I guess. Ironic if you think about he's been fighting to keep FB's algorithms hidden.