8 ms·

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of ll

by bushido 2mo ago

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.

xandrius 2mo ago
Enough good? You are joking, right? They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
- dozerly 2mo ago
  Yea this has to be a joke. They are one of the worst, no-good companies of the modern day and age
  - objektif 2mo ago
    There are definitely evil ones but there are okish ones as well.
    - andrewchilds 2mo ago
      read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and see if you still consider them “okish”.
      - alex1138 2mo ago
        That book is hilarious. In a bad way. (Not the book. I mean that it's a bit tragic) Zuck refuses to meet with WORLD LEADERS in the morning because he's tired from the night before. Kaplan can't even find certain countries on a map (head of global policy). Zuck changes a speech midway through to talk about "We'll give Facebook to refugees" The internet is this vast, intellectual (in the academic, university, .edu sense), cypherpunk, government/activist... thing. It should be interesting. Instead the best we have for social networking is Mark "they trust me; dumb fucks" Zuckerberg and you getting banned from the site at any time for any reason
        callmeal 2mo ago
        > Mark "they trust me; dumb fucks" Zuckerberg There's also Mark "company over country" Zuckerberg.
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Competely agree. React and whatever else they've open sourced is inconsequential compared to the harm they've caused.
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    I'd also argue React is on the "harm" side. :P
    - alex1138 2mo ago
      Check out the 'explaining react's license' thread and all the complaints over that
axegon_ 2mo ago
That's simply not true. The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked, then llama.cpp was the real game changer which was built from the ground up in depressingly short amount of time. Meta had no choice but to take the L and "support" the open source community. The angry "I-hate-you-and-I-hope-you-die" kind of support.
- tehlike 2mo ago
  Why do you think they continued to do it? Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
  - SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
    It’s obvious? They still hate us and hope we die… at least every movement they make seems like that. I kid. I’m all for meta releasing more open weight models. I mean… I’m also 1000% certain that China is going to undercut whatever they can do if even not a technology reason but a legal reason. I’ve seen some wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen.
    - amarcheschi 2mo ago
      >wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen. Such as?
      - echelon 2mo ago
        Minimax has NO filters of any kind, and it's roughly Veo/Sora-quality. You can generate a video of just about any thought in your head at all. IP holders and politicians will not like that. Granted, human artists have always been capable of this. It's just never been worth it to bring most ideas into fruition. Now there's minimal cost to do so. Early Sora, Grok Imagine, and Seedance 2.0 had few filters. Disney, Nintendo, et al. eventually stopped them all from using their IP, which made the appeal fade for a lot of users. Kling and Nano Banana can still generate IP oddly enough.
echelon 2mo ago
> albeit intentionally The model was "accidentally" released. Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know. Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same. The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution. In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc. The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.
- codedokode 2mo ago
  So you are complaining that there are too many open weight models and you would like less of them?
- gfody 2mo ago
  personally I'd love to see open base models, and let companies differentiate with premium access to post training and alignment - that's where the real fight is anyways. they really ought to be pooling their resources/data and getting more economical with the pre-train anyways.
- thepasch 2mo ago
  This seems provably untrue? GLM and Kimi have been at the top of the open weights conversation for a while, and K3 and GLM-5.2 were still released in full; K3 added a commercial clause to the license, but is otherwise still completely open for personal use. And K3 in particular isn't just at the open frontier anymore, but trading blows with the frontier frontier.
doublerabbit 2mo ago
> They've done enough good Oh, please. Feel free to explain. Facebook, Meta. 15+ years of emotional, child and human exploitation. Perverted glassware that spies on folk, lobbyists for age verification and who knows what else. They release an open model and all is fine and dandy? Nah. Please get your priorities straight. What do you think this Open LLM model is doing if not processing data from their murky sources?
canyon289 2mo ago
Disclaimer, I work on Gemma and open models at Deepmind and the opinions here are my own There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment. https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases https://github.com/google-research/bert https://github.com/google-research/bert https://github.com/google-research/t5x https://github.com/google-research/t5x If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.
- kamranjon 2mo ago
  I honestly think of the T5 model family to sort of be the real beginning of this open model craze - I know BERT was already popular for classification etc, but T5 was the first sort of generally useful model, was exceptionally simple to fine-tune, and is still in use today (t5 base is still averaging over a million downloads a month on huggingface), has tons of variants and sort of kickstarted this whole community. US labs get a lot of flack but Google has been super supportive and open in a lot of ways that has pushed this whole endeavor forward, even if I feel like they've sort of declined in transparency in recent years with their open models.
  - Topfi 2mo ago
    Couldn't agree more and can only recommend T5 as a base to anyone. It's amazing to get started, whether as a learning resource or for real (albeit very tailored) applications. Especially the BigScience fine tunes are such a great starting point and I, as a total layman, have learned a lot, especially concerning how a model can be optimised via all manner of methods since even mt0 is small enough to where one can do multiple runs with wildly different outcomes in quick succession. Quantise, prune vocab, try different approaches to sourcing training data, retrain dozens of times, it's all pleasantly possible on consumer hardware [0] and surprising how much you can squeeze in functionality-wise. How does latency change vs memory usage, what affects format reliability, how languages and scripts affect training and the efficiency equation, etc. are all quite exciting to learn. Understand why T5Gemma is no longer under Apache-2.0 and honestly, have not seen that much advantage when testing that vs T0 in my experiments either way, but still, there are good reasons why plain old T5 and its descendants are still popular, licensing being among them. Gemma team also has very consistently interesting models, especially like DiffusionGemma. Ironic, as (beside 2.5 Pro), I have never warmed up to the Gemini series of models but rate Gemma models far higher than e.g. Qwen in direct competition. In any case, thanks to the teams behind these for making as much possible. [0] As in proper consumer hardware, not a cluster of DGX Sparks or Mac Studios solely for experiments that sometimes are asserted as being consumer grade...
s0ss 2mo ago
Open source != open weight. Big difference and it bugs me that nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
- semiquaver 2mo ago
  Words mean what people use them to mean. Ship has sailed whether you approve or not.
  - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
    Yup. An extremist wing of the FOSS movement ceded the debate early on by trying to insist open source required full access to the training data. Philosophically, not wrong. But practically fucked, so the word evolved. Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
    - noosphr 2mo ago
      Training data without the training regime is useless. A cake is not open source because they list the ingredients.
      - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
        Open source captures a practical utility as well as a philosophy. When those two cease to converge, the practical prerogative wins. The correct battle would have been weights + regime. But extremists insisted on data, too, which left Meta as the only other real voice arguing with anything practical. They had open weights. I think eventually open use was negotiated and that closed the case except for the folks still arguing about how to pronounce GIF.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      - glitchc 2mo ago
        Isn't open source not the ingredients but the recipe?
johnbarron 2mo ago
>> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
- johnbarron 2mo ago
  A billionaire (now trilionaire) helping lead and celebrate an extraordinarily rapid dismantling process in which vulnerable children lost life preserving assistance... Essential employees were fired before the government had even established that it could safely do without them, and then... After brandishing the chainsaw of efficiency in public, in the most cowardly way, went and then invoked all legal protections from being deposed on DODGE actions, personally and not answering under oath about the key decisions in that dismantling.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  May be high up the list, but there's purer evil even than that. Even if he is openly courting a Bond villain image and talking up his "robot army".
- insane_dreamer 2mo ago
  Thiel might belong there, and Altman
trolleski 2mo ago
???
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
amelius 2mo ago
I think it's a case of "commoditize your completement" ...
btmiller 2mo ago
[flagged]
- applicative 2mo ago
  The overwhelming majority of actually existing adult Americans use either Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp and are unfamiliar with the theory that they are Nazis.
  - KerrAvon 2mo ago
    Funny, the Germans said the same thing a long time ago!
  - btmiller 2mo ago
    Willful ignorance as an excuse didn’t work out too well post-WW2.
sterlind 2mo ago
llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.
sellmesoap 2mo ago
I have mixed feelings along these lines, I know meta have contributed to various open projects, sometimes Mark pays lip service to “the open internet" while his company represents a constilation of walled gardens. I think PHP got some love, and React is an industry goto (I'm more of a PHP... -> Svelte guy) but are these contributions worth what happened in Myanmar? I say no.
- nylonstrung 2mo ago
  > React is an industry goto Tbh React might be as unforgivable as the Myanmar genocide
ronbenton 2mo ago
Meta is extremely net evil though
breadramen 2mo ago
[dead]
segmondy 2mo ago
It was leaked which put it in the open, it got widely popular and they rode the wave. I'm not so such if they would have widely released it if it wasn't leak. Nevertheless mucho credits to them for following up with llama2, llama3, llama4 and now muse.
sicktriple 2mo ago
Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests. When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.
- dpc050505 2mo ago
  When the material conditions and the people at the top of all of the corporate world lead to decisions with awful ethical implications there's conclusions that should be reached.
  - sicktriple 2mo ago
    Certainly I agree. Those conclusions, if we take them to their root, can only be that there is some type is systematic deficiency in our socioeconomic order that incentivizes this type of behavior. Don't mistake my comment for arguing against criticism of institutions, but that arguing whether or not something is "good" or "bad" doesn't draw you to a conclusion that is any more eor less substantive than that analysis.
- thayne 2mo ago
  Would you say it is a fallacy to apply such value judgements to say, the institutions of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), the KKK, the KGB, etc? How about a company whose business was selling slaves? To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.
  - sicktriple 2mo ago
    Yes, I would. An extremely dangerous and important one to get right in fact. Let me first clarify what I am not saying. I am not saying that these institutions do not create evil, or commit evil acts and should not be resisted or destroyed. If we truly want these things to stop happening, material analysis is the only way to really address the root of the problem. We can easily see that fascism was a result of the twisted incentive structure of colonial empire, the evolution of state corporatism as an economic mode, and rabid anti-communism rolled into one, etc etc. What I'm trying to say is that if your take away was just that Hitler was a bad guy and the Nazis were evil (which they very well may be), then you're doomed to repeat these events because this isn't a real analysis. It's not just that he was evil, it's that the socioeconomics lined up in such a way that allowed these things to happen. There will always be bad people seeking to take advantage of conditions, we will never be able to control that. What we can do is apply material analysis to events and try and determine the root cause of them, so we can prevent them from happening again. What does this have to do with Meta? Well, my point it, Meta doesn't suck because Zuckerberg sucks. He very well may or may not, but that's not alalysis. Meta sucks because the incentive structure surrounding the attention economy is fetid and rotten, and that's a problem with all of us. Thats a problem within our society that allows these types of things to happen, and we ignore that at our own peril, just as we ignore the material reality that lead to the Holocaust by saying it happened because "Hitler and the Nazis were evil and that's that."
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
kazinator 2mo ago
Gaddafi criticized Islamic fanatics; he was basically a good guy in the Middle East.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
gmerc 2mo ago
Nobody learned nothing from the metaverse.
latexr 2mo ago
> I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good “Enough” for what? Surely not enough to offset all the bad they’ve inflicted and allowed on the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook > I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. Zuckerberg has shown through repeated action that he does not deserve any benefit of the doubt. This is the guy who called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him. This is not even a case of “fool me once” anymore. If you continue to believe Zuckerberg, you’ve been fooled dozens, hundreds of times, and shame is definitely on you.
BiteCode_dev 2mo ago
I read this comment in a same way I read "Microsoft in not that bad" comments in 2020. This is why bad people keep inheriting the earth. We keep forgiving them and they keep doing their crap.
johnnienaked 2mo ago
Net good for Meta, they hope
kdavis 2mo ago
I know I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but the sentence... "Meta did...kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023" ignores the majority of open source software history[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
- GaryBluto 2mo ago
  I imagine he was referring to the open source LLM model race considering the subject of discussion.
larodi 2mo ago
Ha-ha they released nothing. It got leaked and without the source for it. Totally wrong to portray them as benevolent benefactors to the ML race
claaams 2mo ago
I think this is categorically false. And furthermore comments like this are being used to astroturf and protect reputations of no-good companies and AI slop to keep the bubble growing. Embarrassingly, Mark Zuckerberg spent 80 billion dollars creating Miis for the oculus. The guy also comes off as extremely miserable and delusional in such a unique way that it's possible that there's no real psychological language to describe what is happening to him because his situation is so rare.
trolleski 2mo ago
I mean... I'm sure SS had wives and kids. It doesn't mean we should focus on that while analyzing their impact on the world.
GlacierFox 2mo ago
It's easy to appear to have good intentions when you're railing against the companies that have decimated your output and made you [Meta] almost irrelevant in the AI 'race'.
maffulli 2mo ago
Except that Llama's license has restrictions that make it incompatible with the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not-open-source https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not... I haven't checked the license of the new models, yet.
sarjann 2mo ago
Fundamentally I always try to look at incentives. It's not that they are good or bad but that incentives favour certain behaviours. Google is incentivised to collect a bunch of data (like FB) to improve their ad serving etc. Apple does not have that incentive as they don't make as much off advertising as hardware / app revenue. NVIDIA is friendly with open source as they want to commoditise the model layer and take the gains in the hardware / data center layer. I am trying to think what the incentive is here.
- loveiswork 2mo ago
  - Juicing community discovery of new useful AI features they can incorporate into their own apps - Juicing demand for AI workloads for which they can lease out Meta data centers to establish themselves in the infrastructure as a service space - Preventing extreme capital concentration at any single competitor - Fostering a market of small innovative companies they can then acquire
htrp 2mo ago
Do you remember opt??
threethirtytwo 2mo ago
People like to polarize themselves to one extreme. Plenty of HN people call Elon Musk "pure evil." It's the most ludicrous statement ever. Let me be clear: with electric cars and solar, elon musk has done more net good for the world then almost everyone on HN. Is elon musk perfect? No. Far from it. It's within the imperfectness that people find reasons to attack him.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
  One nit: > It's the most ludicrous statement ever. That is also polarized to the extreme, to the point that it's ludicrous.
  - threethirtytwo 2mo ago
    Oh shit, let me dial it back: "Just ludicrous" not the most ludicrous statement ever. Also I have no interest in what you have to say.
throwatdem12311 2mo ago
The tobacco companies gave enough money to charity so we should just be happy about it. Never mind all the horrible things they’ve done.
deIeted 2mo ago
Well, the last part of what you said is redundant. I'd say the only reason Meta released some open-source stuff is because they wanted to try to minimize the growth of what was already out there so they could give themselves time, because zuck went all in on VR and not all in on AI. What is he going to change his name to next? It was literally like December. We're gonna rename ourselves Meta. January, ChatGPT 3.whatever has been released, and everyone was like, "What's this new AI stuff?"
mapotofu 2mo ago
> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This post is utter bullshit and I think we’re all tired of the apologists, especially when it comes to Mark. These “middle of the road, let’s all be nice” solutions haven’t worked at all, and saying “Meta has done enough good” is extraordinarily questionable for those of us who have watched these tools rip apart the social fabric. Absolutely nothing will change when toothless people like yourself try to act like Mark is a normal person - we’ve all seen his fake, robotic, controlling, psychotic behavior over and over and over and over.

by bushido 2mo ago

xandrius 2mo ago

Enough good? You are joking, right? They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.

dozerly 2mo ago
Yea this has to be a joke. They are one of the worst, no-good companies of the modern day and age
- objektif 2mo ago
  There are definitely evil ones but there are okish ones as well.
  - andrewchilds 2mo ago
    read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and see if you still consider them “okish”.
    - alex1138 2mo ago
      That book is hilarious. In a bad way. (Not the book. I mean that it's a bit tragic) Zuck refuses to meet with WORLD LEADERS in the morning because he's tired from the night before. Kaplan can't even find certain countries on a map (head of global policy). Zuck changes a speech midway through to talk about "We'll give Facebook to refugees" The internet is this vast, intellectual (in the academic, university, .edu sense), cypherpunk, government/activist... thing. It should be interesting. Instead the best we have for social networking is Mark "they trust me; dumb fucks" Zuckerberg and you getting banned from the site at any time for any reason
      - callmeal 2mo ago
        > Mark "they trust me; dumb fucks" Zuckerberg There's also Mark "company over country" Zuckerberg.
SoftTalker 2mo ago
Competely agree. React and whatever else they've open sourced is inconsequential compared to the harm they've caused.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  I'd also argue React is on the "harm" side. :P
  - alex1138 2mo ago
    Check out the 'explaining react's license' thread and all the complaints over that

axegon_ 2mo ago

That's simply not true. The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked, then llama.cpp was the real game changer which was built from the ground up in depressingly short amount of time. Meta had no choice but to take the L and "support" the open source community. The angry "I-hate-you-and-I-hope-you-die" kind of support.

tehlike 2mo ago
Why do you think they continued to do it? Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
  It’s obvious? They still hate us and hope we die… at least every movement they make seems like that. I kid. I’m all for meta releasing more open weight models. I mean… I’m also 1000% certain that China is going to undercut whatever they can do if even not a technology reason but a legal reason. I’ve seen some wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen.
  - amarcheschi 2mo ago
    >wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen. Such as?
    - echelon 2mo ago
      Minimax has NO filters of any kind, and it's roughly Veo/Sora-quality. You can generate a video of just about any thought in your head at all. IP holders and politicians will not like that. Granted, human artists have always been capable of this. It's just never been worth it to bring most ideas into fruition. Now there's minimal cost to do so. Early Sora, Grok Imagine, and Seedance 2.0 had few filters. Disney, Nintendo, et al. eventually stopped them all from using their IP, which made the appeal fade for a lot of users. Kling and Nano Banana can still generate IP oddly enough.

echelon 2mo ago

> albeit intentionally The model was "accidentally" released. Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know. Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same. The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution. In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc. The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.

codedokode 2mo ago
So you are complaining that there are too many open weight models and you would like less of them?
gfody 2mo ago
personally I'd love to see open base models, and let companies differentiate with premium access to post training and alignment - that's where the real fight is anyways. they really ought to be pooling their resources/data and getting more economical with the pre-train anyways.
thepasch 2mo ago
This seems provably untrue? GLM and Kimi have been at the top of the open weights conversation for a while, and K3 and GLM-5.2 were still released in full; K3 added a commercial clause to the license, but is otherwise still completely open for personal use. And K3 in particular isn't just at the open frontier anymore, but trading blows with the frontier frontier.

doublerabbit 2mo ago

> They've done enough good Oh, please. Feel free to explain. Facebook, Meta. 15+ years of emotional, child and human exploitation. Perverted glassware that spies on folk, lobbyists for age verification and who knows what else. They release an open model and all is fine and dandy? Nah. Please get your priorities straight. What do you think this Open LLM model is doing if not processing data from their murky sources?

canyon289 2mo ago

Disclaimer, I work on Gemma and open models at Deepmind and the opinions here are my own There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment. https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases https://github.com/google-research/bert https://github.com/google-research/bert https://github.com/google-research/t5x https://github.com/google-research/t5x If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.

kamranjon 2mo ago
I honestly think of the T5 model family to sort of be the real beginning of this open model craze - I know BERT was already popular for classification etc, but T5 was the first sort of generally useful model, was exceptionally simple to fine-tune, and is still in use today (t5 base is still averaging over a million downloads a month on huggingface), has tons of variants and sort of kickstarted this whole community. US labs get a lot of flack but Google has been super supportive and open in a lot of ways that has pushed this whole endeavor forward, even if I feel like they've sort of declined in transparency in recent years with their open models.
- Topfi 2mo ago
  Couldn't agree more and can only recommend T5 as a base to anyone. It's amazing to get started, whether as a learning resource or for real (albeit very tailored) applications. Especially the BigScience fine tunes are such a great starting point and I, as a total layman, have learned a lot, especially concerning how a model can be optimised via all manner of methods since even mt0 is small enough to where one can do multiple runs with wildly different outcomes in quick succession. Quantise, prune vocab, try different approaches to sourcing training data, retrain dozens of times, it's all pleasantly possible on consumer hardware [0] and surprising how much you can squeeze in functionality-wise. How does latency change vs memory usage, what affects format reliability, how languages and scripts affect training and the efficiency equation, etc. are all quite exciting to learn. Understand why T5Gemma is no longer under Apache-2.0 and honestly, have not seen that much advantage when testing that vs T0 in my experiments either way, but still, there are good reasons why plain old T5 and its descendants are still popular, licensing being among them. Gemma team also has very consistently interesting models, especially like DiffusionGemma. Ironic, as (beside 2.5 Pro), I have never warmed up to the Gemini series of models but rate Gemma models far higher than e.g. Qwen in direct competition. In any case, thanks to the teams behind these for making as much possible. [0] As in proper consumer hardware, not a cluster of DGX Sparks or Mac Studios solely for experiments that sometimes are asserted as being consumer grade...

s0ss 2mo ago

Open source != open weight. Big difference and it bugs me that nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.

semiquaver 2mo ago
Words mean what people use them to mean. Ship has sailed whether you approve or not.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  Yup. An extremist wing of the FOSS movement ceded the debate early on by trying to insist open source required full access to the training data. Philosophically, not wrong. But practically fucked, so the word evolved. Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
  - noosphr 2mo ago
    Training data without the training regime is useless. A cake is not open source because they list the ingredients.
    - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
      Open source captures a practical utility as well as a philosophy. When those two cease to converge, the practical prerogative wins. The correct battle would have been weights + regime. But extremists insisted on data, too, which left Meta as the only other real voice arguing with anything practical. They had open weights. I think eventually open use was negotiated and that closed the case except for the folks still arguing about how to pronounce GIF.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - glitchc 2mo ago
      Isn't open source not the ingredients but the recipe?

johnbarron 2mo ago

>> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE

johnbarron 2mo ago
A billionaire (now trilionaire) helping lead and celebrate an extraordinarily rapid dismantling process in which vulnerable children lost life preserving assistance... Essential employees were fired before the government had even established that it could safely do without them, and then... After brandishing the chainsaw of efficiency in public, in the most cowardly way, went and then invoked all legal protections from being deposed on DODGE actions, personally and not answering under oath about the key decisions in that dismantling.
ben_w 2mo ago
May be high up the list, but there's purer evil even than that. Even if he is openly courting a Bond villain image and talking up his "robot army".
insane_dreamer 2mo ago
Thiel might belong there, and Altman

trolleski 2mo ago

???

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

amelius 2mo ago

I think it's a case of "commoditize your completement" ...

btmiller 2mo ago

[flagged]

applicative 2mo ago
The overwhelming majority of actually existing adult Americans use either Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp and are unfamiliar with the theory that they are Nazis.
- KerrAvon 2mo ago
  Funny, the Germans said the same thing a long time ago!
- btmiller 2mo ago
  Willful ignorance as an excuse didn’t work out too well post-WW2.

sterlind 2mo ago

llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.

sellmesoap 2mo ago

I have mixed feelings along these lines, I know meta have contributed to various open projects, sometimes Mark pays lip service to “the open internet" while his company represents a constilation of walled gardens. I think PHP got some love, and React is an industry goto (I'm more of a PHP... -> Svelte guy) but are these contributions worth what happened in Myanmar? I say no.

nylonstrung 2mo ago
> React is an industry goto Tbh React might be as unforgivable as the Myanmar genocide

ronbenton 2mo ago

Meta is extremely net evil though

breadramen 2mo ago

[dead]

segmondy 2mo ago

It was leaked which put it in the open, it got widely popular and they rode the wave. I'm not so such if they would have widely released it if it wasn't leak. Nevertheless mucho credits to them for following up with llama2, llama3, llama4 and now muse.

sicktriple 2mo ago

Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests. When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.

dpc050505 2mo ago
When the material conditions and the people at the top of all of the corporate world lead to decisions with awful ethical implications there's conclusions that should be reached.
- sicktriple 2mo ago
  Certainly I agree. Those conclusions, if we take them to their root, can only be that there is some type is systematic deficiency in our socioeconomic order that incentivizes this type of behavior. Don't mistake my comment for arguing against criticism of institutions, but that arguing whether or not something is "good" or "bad" doesn't draw you to a conclusion that is any more eor less substantive than that analysis.
thayne 2mo ago
Would you say it is a fallacy to apply such value judgements to say, the institutions of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), the KKK, the KGB, etc? How about a company whose business was selling slaves? To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.
- sicktriple 2mo ago
  Yes, I would. An extremely dangerous and important one to get right in fact. Let me first clarify what I am not saying. I am not saying that these institutions do not create evil, or commit evil acts and should not be resisted or destroyed. If we truly want these things to stop happening, material analysis is the only way to really address the root of the problem. We can easily see that fascism was a result of the twisted incentive structure of colonial empire, the evolution of state corporatism as an economic mode, and rabid anti-communism rolled into one, etc etc. What I'm trying to say is that if your take away was just that Hitler was a bad guy and the Nazis were evil (which they very well may be), then you're doomed to repeat these events because this isn't a real analysis. It's not just that he was evil, it's that the socioeconomics lined up in such a way that allowed these things to happen. There will always be bad people seeking to take advantage of conditions, we will never be able to control that. What we can do is apply material analysis to events and try and determine the root cause of them, so we can prevent them from happening again. What does this have to do with Meta? Well, my point it, Meta doesn't suck because Zuckerberg sucks. He very well may or may not, but that's not alalysis. Meta sucks because the incentive structure surrounding the attention economy is fetid and rotten, and that's a problem with all of us. Thats a problem within our society that allows these types of things to happen, and we ignore that at our own peril, just as we ignore the material reality that lead to the Holocaust by saying it happened because "Hitler and the Nazis were evil and that's that."

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

kazinator 2mo ago

Gaddafi criticized Islamic fanatics; he was basically a good guy in the Middle East.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

gmerc 2mo ago

Nobody learned nothing from the metaverse.

latexr 2mo ago

> I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good “Enough” for what? Surely not enough to offset all the bad they’ve inflicted and allowed on the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook > I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. Zuckerberg has shown through repeated action that he does not deserve any benefit of the doubt. This is the guy who called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him. This is not even a case of “fool me once” anymore. If you continue to believe Zuckerberg, you’ve been fooled dozens, hundreds of times, and shame is definitely on you.

BiteCode_dev 2mo ago

I read this comment in a same way I read "Microsoft in not that bad" comments in 2020. This is why bad people keep inheriting the earth. We keep forgiving them and they keep doing their crap.

johnnienaked 2mo ago

Net good for Meta, they hope

kdavis 2mo ago

I know I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but the sentence... "Meta did...kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023" ignores the majority of open source software history[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

GaryBluto 2mo ago
I imagine he was referring to the open source LLM model race considering the subject of discussion.

larodi 2mo ago

Ha-ha they released nothing. It got leaked and without the source for it. Totally wrong to portray them as benevolent benefactors to the ML race

claaams 2mo ago

I think this is categorically false. And furthermore comments like this are being used to astroturf and protect reputations of no-good companies and AI slop to keep the bubble growing. Embarrassingly, Mark Zuckerberg spent 80 billion dollars creating Miis for the oculus. The guy also comes off as extremely miserable and delusional in such a unique way that it's possible that there's no real psychological language to describe what is happening to him because his situation is so rare.

trolleski 2mo ago

I mean... I'm sure SS had wives and kids. It doesn't mean we should focus on that while analyzing their impact on the world.

GlacierFox 2mo ago

It's easy to appear to have good intentions when you're railing against the companies that have decimated your output and made you [Meta] almost irrelevant in the AI 'race'.

maffulli 2mo ago

Except that Llama's license has restrictions that make it incompatible with the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not-open-source https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not... I haven't checked the license of the new models, yet.

sarjann 2mo ago

Fundamentally I always try to look at incentives. It's not that they are good or bad but that incentives favour certain behaviours. Google is incentivised to collect a bunch of data (like FB) to improve their ad serving etc. Apple does not have that incentive as they don't make as much off advertising as hardware / app revenue. NVIDIA is friendly with open source as they want to commoditise the model layer and take the gains in the hardware / data center layer. I am trying to think what the incentive is here.

loveiswork 2mo ago
- Juicing community discovery of new useful AI features they can incorporate into their own apps - Juicing demand for AI workloads for which they can lease out Meta data centers to establish themselves in the infrastructure as a service space - Preventing extreme capital concentration at any single competitor - Fostering a market of small innovative companies they can then acquire

htrp 2mo ago

Do you remember opt??

threethirtytwo 2mo ago

People like to polarize themselves to one extreme. Plenty of HN people call Elon Musk "pure evil." It's the most ludicrous statement ever. Let me be clear: with electric cars and solar, elon musk has done more net good for the world then almost everyone on HN. Is elon musk perfect? No. Far from it. It's within the imperfectness that people find reasons to attack him.

AnimalMuppet 2mo ago
One nit: > It's the most ludicrous statement ever. That is also polarized to the extreme, to the point that it's ludicrous.
- threethirtytwo 2mo ago
  Oh shit, let me dial it back: "Just ludicrous" not the most ludicrous statement ever. Also I have no interest in what you have to say.

throwatdem12311 2mo ago

The tobacco companies gave enough money to charity so we should just be happy about it. Never mind all the horrible things they’ve done.

deIeted 2mo ago

Well, the last part of what you said is redundant. I'd say the only reason Meta released some open-source stuff is because they wanted to try to minimize the growth of what was already out there so they could give themselves time, because zuck went all in on VR and not all in on AI. What is he going to change his name to next? It was literally like December. We're gonna rename ourselves Meta. January, ChatGPT 3.whatever has been released, and everyone was like, "What's this new AI stuff?"

mapotofu 2mo ago

> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This post is utter bullshit and I think we’re all tired of the apologists, especially when it comes to Mark. These “middle of the road, let’s all be nice” solutions haven’t worked at all, and saying “Meta has done enough good” is extraordinarily questionable for those of us who have watched these tools rip apart the social fabric. Absolutely nothing will change when toothless people like yourself try to act like Mark is a normal person - we’ve all seen his fake, robotic, controlling, psychotic behavior over and over and over and over.