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It’s a long term pattern. When you’re winning (Anthropic), you keep the tech closed and try to monetize it as much as possible. When you’re losing (Meta), you o
by drob518 2mo ago
It’s a long term pattern. When you’re winning (Anthropic), you keep the tech closed and try to monetize it as much as possible. When you’re losing (Meta), you open it up or drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down while you prepare a “standard” version of it. You also highlight how altruistic and morally good you are for having done so. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s all a game.
- basch 2mo agoNo. Opening it is to commoditize and reduce the price to use. This increases participation and creates new consumers and demand. Demand creates justification for further creation. All the participants know it’s both a race to the bottom and a competition for premium tier at the same time. It’s two different games, meta in only really playing one of them successfully.
- Melatonic 2mo agoI suspect its also because Facebook has the infrastructure to do this. One thing they have done from the start is quite good infrastructure without outsourcing to any of the big cloud providers. I cant imagine demand / bandwith / compute use is increasing much for Facebook itself so they probably have the money and time to dedicate to scaling up for AI research.
- overfeed 2mo ago> ...drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down Anthropic et al recently proposed a supranational AI governing body designed to slow everyone down (euphemistically calling it "AI pacing"). Are the Pacer signatories losing?
- skohan 2mo agoThat could be a move towards regulatory capture. Enact standards that they (and OpenAI) largely control, block access to Chinese models in the US, and effectively prevent challengers from catching up. At the same time they slow down the arms race, so they can back off on training Capex without losing their lead.
- solenoid0937 2mo agoLiterally nothing in their proposal is about blocking access to Chinese models, HN has devolved so much with these conspiratorial hot takes.
- drob518 2mo agoOf course. They’ll never put “stop the Chinese models” in the organization’s bylaws. But don’t be naive about why they are doing it.
- thraway3837 2mo agoThe governing body is only the western allies. USA + AUS + EU. Or anyone else that may sign a deeply disturbing and restrictive treaty. It's to make sure that the global majority does not make a better model or have access to the same hardware. As is currently the case with embargoes on EUV machines going to China, etc. Models are not a moat, and I think OpenAI/Anthropic know this. They know that their IPO is being weakened by the open models. Neither is hardware. We are not far from other countries catching up with silicon that matches or exceeds western capabilities, and it will be cheaper.
- drob518 2mo agoI think you’re spot on here. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning cash at a phenomenal rate (clearly unsustainable in the long run), but it isn’t clear what the exit ramp is for them. If they stop training and just focus on inference (which they claim is profitable), they immediately fall off the list of frontier models. I’m sure China also sees this and is using state subsidies to fund industry and challenging the West to keep up. This is similar to the way that Reagan outspent the USSR in the 1980s, only now the Chinese are funding it. That said, it’s also not clear what happens if the Chinese models “win” (is that bad?), particularly when all the models get so good as to meet the needs of most applications. Anyway, AI lies at this interesting intersection of both standard technology competition and geopolitical competition.
- drob518 2mo agoIn some aspect, yes, or they fear they will. For instance, Anthropic may fear that Chinese models will become “better” because they won’t put as many guardrails up, so they want everyone to agree to the guardrails such that if a model comes out showing better scores than Fable they can say “But it’s a dangerous model that doesn’t conform to our Pacing agreement.” Or, they may be worried about government regulation that would really hurt their ability to move fast, so they want to get ahead of it with some “regulatory body” that they control. The motion picture, TV and gaming industries did this with self-imposed rating systems. The comic book folks did it with the “Comics Code Authority” back in 1954.
- sanderjd 2mo agoYes, but it's good for everyone that the strategy of attempting to commoditize the cash cow of a competitor exists.
- drob518 2mo agoI made no value judgment about it. I merely note that it’s a game. Meta is not being altruistic or doing anything for the “good” of humanity or whatever. To be clear, I like competition with companies releasing open weight models.
- thraway3837 2mo agoGreat take, just came here to say this and you said it better than I could have. I don't trust Zuck, and I think there's a larger strategy that he has been advised on this and he's simply copy pasting a PR piece his people made.
- drob518 2mo agoThanks. Yea, I’m sure there are corp strategies at play here. Zuckerberg didn’t just roll out of bed and decide to do this one day. Ever since the Llama 4 fiasco, I’m sure they’ve been trying to restart everything, but for whatever reason they can’t seem to deliver something on the frontier. So, when you’re behind, play the “open” card and accuse your competitors of being bad people. I’ve been a part of running this same play multiple times at multiple companies over decades.
- germandiago 2mo agoCompetition is good.
- drob518 2mo agoOf course it is. I never said differently.