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bushido 4 hours 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.
canyon289 3 hours 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.
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 3 hours 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.
tomaspiaggio12 8 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
axegon_ 3 hours 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.
andy99 2 hours ago [-]
It’s hard to know in retrospect what was strategy and what was dumb luck. This was in the midst of hysterical calls to limit access by “AI researchers” and safety/ethics types, when very facile takes still has a lot of sway (I think we’ll feel the same in three years about the current Fable stuff). It may have been hard for Meta to just release it outright.
What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.
I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.
Forgeties79 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t understand how you can look at what’s happening right now and call people simply calling for caution “hysterical”
timmmmmmay 50 minutes ago [-]
I don't think you can characterize the discussion around then as simple calling for caution. There was a serious attempt to keep all access to even very basic LLM techniques locked into essentially an exclusive guild.
1 hours ago [-]
tehlike 3 hours ago [-]
Why do you think they continued to do it?
Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
51 minutes ago [-]
axegon_ 2 hours ago [-]
I've worked long enough at large tech giants to know how things really are. Also a large part of the reason why I'd never join one again, no matter what they have to offer. Meta, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Openai, anthropic, oracle, nvidia, Microsoft, etc. - same shit with a different badge on top.
truncate 2 hours ago [-]
TBH, having worked at all big-tech, startup and mid-sized companies, pretty much most has some major pros and cons of their own, and these days ever more so. With certain big-tech at-least there some chance of getting decent WLB.
ternaryoperator 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think Nvidia fits on that list. It’s a company with a pro-employee culture, very few layoffs, and many employees who have been there a long time.
flaburgan 1 hours ago [-]
It is also a company with a terrible history regarding open-source. AMD is much better from every point of view.
bastawhiz 2 hours ago [-]
Because it took off. All of a sudden they captured more customers than they could have imagined they would have, and throwing away the lead they unintentionally gave themselves (in terms of usage and mindshare) would have undone all of that and more.
SV_BubbleTime 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
>wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen.
Such as?
cma 3 hours ago [-]
> The reason why llama is open source is simply because it got leaked
It arguably didn't really get leaked, and they had the .edu req mainly for fair use education exemption when legality of models was much more uncertain.
s0ss 3 hours 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.
dragonwriter 6 minutes ago [-]
If the weight, training and inference code, and training data are all released under of Open Source (OSI definition) license, the it is unmistakably “open source”. As you drift from that it becomes less clearly so, and when you get to no training data, and the model weights license having extensive limitations on allowed uses, the use of even “open weights” becomes deceptive.
35 minutes ago [-]
semiquaver 3 hours ago [-]
Words mean what people use them to mean. Ship has sailed whether you approve or not.
JumpCrisscross 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
Training data without the training regime is useless. A cake is not open source because they list the ingredients.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours 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.
2 hours ago [-]
sterlind 2 hours ago [-]
also, you can do a lot to finetune or repurpose an open weight model. much more easily than you can mod closed source binaries.
s0ss 3 hours ago [-]
You can choose to use the wrong words all you want. Doing so intentionally is an interesting choice.
tripleee 3 hours ago [-]
We're not talking about standard code here. It's totally reasonable to change the meaning depending on context.
s0ss 2 hours ago [-]
I vehemently disagree. There's no source and it's not open, the licenses are often abysmal too.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
Communication is not a one-player game.
For example, if I was being pedantic:
> nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
"nobody" would include you.
And then I might complain about we use the word "weight" for something massless, or how "bugs me" is *ento*mologically incorrect: https://xkcd.com/1012/
This is of course not a good use of time. I wonder if illustrating the point about how language is dynamic and meanings are descriptive not proscriptive, was a good use?
s0ss 2 hours ago [-]
yeah, I'm not sure what your goal is pedantically picking apart my argument when the subject at hand is clearly not "open source". love xkcd though. :P
xandrius 4 hours ago [-]
Enough good? You are joking, right?
They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
dozerly 3 hours ago [-]
Yea this has to be a joke. They are one of the worst, no-good companies of the modern day and age
objektif 2 hours ago [-]
There are definitely evil ones but there are okish ones as well.
andrewchilds 1 hours ago [-]
read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and see if you still consider them “okish”.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
Competely agree. React and whatever else they've open sourced is inconsequential compared to the harm they've caused.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
I'd also argue React is on the "harm" side. :P
alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
Check out the 'explaining react's license' thread and all the complaints over that
sellmesoap 2 hours 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.
ronbenton 20 minutes ago [-]
Meta is extremely net evil though
amelius 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's a case of "commoditize your completement" ...
sterlind 2 hours ago [-]
llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.
echelon 3 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
So you are complaining that there are too many open weight models and you would like less of them?
johnbarron 3 hours ago [-]
>> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil.
I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
ben_w 2 hours 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".
johnbarron 3 hours 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.
doublerabbit 3 hours 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?
btmiller 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
applicative 2 hours 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.
btmiller 30 minutes ago [-]
Willful ignorance as an excuse didn’t work out too well post-WW2.
KerrAvon 1 hours ago [-]
Funny, the Germans said the same thing a long time ago!
trolleski 3 hours ago [-]
???
3 hours ago [-]
ViktorRay 9 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours 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.
pc86 4 hours 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.
tqi 2 hours 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.
24t 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 3 hours 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.
danielrhodes 4 hours 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.
cataphract 8 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances
chrsw 4 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
Manufacturing was never strategic.
(That was irony, by the way.)
skohan 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't this meta release kind of a counterexample to that?
mrDmrTmrJ 4 hours 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.?
sanderjd 4 hours 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.
munk-a 4 hours 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.
nradov 4 hours 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.
mirekrusin 3 hours ago [-]
There is no reliable evidence they won’t.
Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.
The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.
Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.
nradov 3 hours ago [-]
OK well then let's check back here in a few years to see if any of them managed to build an AGI. Until then it's just idle speculation. Anything could happen ... or not.
Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?
failbuffer 4 hours ago [-]
Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?
KPGv2 4 hours ago [-]
> as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER
I think you'll find very few people here sympathetic to misanthropic (ba dum tss) goals like yours. It's evident at this point that AGI will destroy economies, democracy, and upward mobility. There is no Star Trek future. There is only an Elysium future with AGI.
razster 39 minutes 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.
jamesrr39 4 hours 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.
timClicks 4 hours 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.
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
If only folks did the same in regards to React adoption....
strtok 52 minutes ago [-]
Unless weights are being manipulated to make the model respond in a way that favors the owners.
waffletower 7 hours 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
numpad0 4 hours 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.
dragonwriter 3 hours 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.
magicalist 3 hours 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.
jmalicki 5 hours 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"
bigfishrunning 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, but have those positive effects on AI research had a positive or negative effect on society? I guess time will tell
mcbuilder 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I feel like we bigly lose to China if we don't.
godelski 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.
dudefeliciano 4 hours ago [-]
> those in power will just learn to ignore us.
This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime. So no, I don't feel like praising them when they do one seemingly "good" thing, while simultaneously doing 99 "bad" things.
baron816 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
windexh8er 5 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
Rupert Murdoch absolutely is capable of doing all that. He’s absolutely done far more harm globally than Zuckerberg.
windexh8er 2 hours 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.
> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.
No, they don’t do the same thing.
creaturemachine 5 hours ago [-]
Have you read Sarah Wynn-Williams' book? The whole org is rotten.
SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago [-]
Sarah Wynn-Williams book contains a number of implausible anecdotes which people repeat as gospel truth even though they have not AFAIK been corroborated. I am pretty skeptical, for example, that Sheryl Sandberg punished Ms. Wynn-Williams for not getting in bed with her.
FireBeyond 4 hours ago [-]
And yet Sandberg has not sued for defamation…
dwedge 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure she needs to given the rest of the case against the author
> Ms Wynn-Williams was told she must refrain from engaging in or "amplifying any further disparaging, crucial or otherwise detrimental comments".
> All previous disparaging comments "to the extent within her control" must also be retracted, the ruling also said
She apparently isn't even allowed to criticise Meta in private. They're a horrible company but so many of that book read like poor fiction
bluGill 4 hours ago [-]
Is it really worth getting a lawyer? Even of you win what is the gain?
creaturemachine 4 hours ago [-]
They could have it taken out of print if it was as fictional and damaging as some say. I see new copies are still for sale so it can't be that.
bluGill 58 minutes ago [-]
Oh, I agree they could. Question is, is it worth the bother? the lawyers are the only ones who win if you tried anything.
SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago [-]
Why would she want to? Attempting to prove that private conversations did not happen as alleged is always a frustrating uphill battle, and winning the lawsuit wouldn’t stop people on social media from saying they think the court got it wrong and Sandberg really did do it. Wynn-Williams is already not allowed to repeat the allegations right now due to her case with Meta.
A lawsuit might get the relevant passage yanked from the book, I suppose.
dwedge 4 hours ago [-]
I read half of it. I couldn't get paat her weird character attacks at his autism traits, her attacks on the male programmers in general despite most of the problems she faced coming from her (all female) team, and how she tried to frame herself as both indispensable and some unaware victim. I think the moment she wrote about giving birth while writing emails and her doctor begging her to stop as a humblebrag was the end of my relationship with that book
Reddit_MLP2 4 hours ago [-]
legacy media is not proactively manipulating us via algorithmically amplifying division to increase 'engagement', all to sell us some ads... I do think Zuck is one of the more harmful figures in modern history. That being said, good open models? great!
hn_throwaway_99 5 hours ago [-]
I always hope that people who write things like this are considerably younger than I, because as someone who experienced "legacy media" for decades before the Internet was widely available, the idea that "they’re not doing anything more evil than what was already the norm" is complete, total, 100% bullshit.
Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.
I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.
Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.
munk-a 4 hours ago [-]
There were some brief excellent years in the nascent days of the blogosphere where stories that CNN would miss (especially stories about marginalized groups) managed to get widespread attention and the compensation to journalists held up. But where we are today in terms of news compared to the 00s or 90s (even with all the retrospective knowledge about journalism catastrophes like NYT's coverage of the Iraq War) is so much fundamentally worse.
Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.
Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.
hn_throwaway_99 3 hours ago [-]
> Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige.
I agree with the first part of that, but not necessarily the second. For a very long time in America good journalism was essentially paid for by classified ads. They were really two separate (but obviously related) businesses. Journalism could be more "walled off" from the money making side of things since classified ads were bringing in money hand over fist.
The Internet decimated the classified ads business, so now you see more sensational stories that try to make money in their own right. Even on the CNN website, there are ads at the bottom that are confusingly meant to look like stories. They're often embarrassingly dumb (literal "the one trick doctors don't want you to know" type of stuff), but I think that's what it's come to for news businesses to survive.
Krasnol 4 hours ago [-]
> But I think the legacy media deserves 100x that criticism for doing the same thing.
This comparison is absurd.
"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.
So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.
...compared to Elon for example.
Barrin92 4 hours ago [-]
>Zuck built an empire purpose built to damage democracy and the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money.
That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings.
I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions.
In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
Krasnol 2 hours ago [-]
> That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one.
I don't know how you define open/closed society but as we've seen and we keep on seeing that this kind of manipulation only got worse AND is profitable. So how is your argument supposed to work?
I mean we're talking about a person who got where he is because he build a page where him and his co-students could rate other students on their looks.
I doubt he really cares...at all. Those hearings needed to be there so he can feel that there are still borders but it doesn't mean that he won't find other ways in the future and use it for his evil purposes just like the times before.
I mean is there anything that could show as that he became a new human being? With higher levels of morality? The person who abolished all the safeguards on his platforms as soon as Trump was elected?
Why should anyone ever trust this man again?
> In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
Having feelings, wanting to be seen or heard, reacting to attractive people in a different way, and so on are not "problems". This is what makes us human.
This is also what people like Zuck are misusing for their own greed. Sure he can't end democracy by himself. He can help it with large sums of money and tools, though. And this is what he's doing.
Shifting the blame and responsibility onto the whole population is, very mildly said: misleading.
Barrin92 1 hours ago [-]
>So how is your argument supposed to work?
My argument's pretty straight forward. Manipulation on the platform isn't profitable for Mark Zuckerberg. What's profitable is selling ads. Making teenagers anorexic doesn't increase his revenue, it just creates problems for him.
Sure he doesn't care either as long as it doesn't, I agree but also he shouldn't because he's not the nation's parent. I think Zuckerberg's due diligence is done when he doesn't interfere or steer politics, he has not, and should not have responsibility for how people use his apps.
It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people. What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses. In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.
I'm not shifting blame, in a democracy people get the institutions, companies and leaders they deserve, by definition.
alex1138 4 hours 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
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.
cush 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.
cush 3 hours ago [-]
No it absolutely is not. In a perfectly logical frictioness-plane world it might be true, but this is the real world. The entire premise of open models is predicated on the fact that Meta is planning on supplying free and equitable inference and services around it. It’s only true if you assume Meta keeps their end of the deal and doesn’t do the thing they’ve been doing over and over and over for decades and turning you into the product
sscaryterry 4 hours 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.
dwaltrip 2 hours ago [-]
How should one parse both the validity of an argument and the agenda of the speaker?
bevr1337 4 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
using an ad hominem to attack the concept of ad hominem lol
cush 2 hours 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
A_D_E_P_T 8 hours 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 8 hours 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.
basch 8 hours 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.
diegolas 8 hours 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.
butlike 8 hours 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.
lukan 8 hours 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)
GetMeSoon 8 hours ago [-]
> FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.
As opposed to literally any social network out there, right?
lukan 7 hours ago [-]
Well, here on HN the intention seems to be to, to have interesting discussions. That works for me and other social media I do not use.
Except well, various messenger to be in contact with the groups and people I choose with no engagement algorithm deciding what posts I see, simple chronological order.
windexh8er 5 hours ago [-]
I'm curious how well influence campaigns work on platforms like Mastodon, or even BlueSky. They are, likely, not sourced from the platform providers which is definitely not the case for FB.
soraminazuki 7 hours ago [-]
What do you mean, "as opposed to"? Yes, there are other scumbag billionaires weaponizing their social media platforms to ruin society. No, that doesn't make Mark Zuckerberg a better person.
beagle3 6 hours ago [-]
At the same time they are strongly promoting the OS age laws.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
razster 33 minutes ago [-]
I'll never allow anything related by META to touch my system/workflow. They're a cancer and I will stick to that. I see 0 good from this.
dummydummy1234 7 hours ago [-]
Somewhat agree, but Facebook and social media are really bad though, even leaving aside extreme cases like Myanmar genocide promotion.
I think Facebook would need to do a lot more to balance the scales.
waffletower 7 hours ago [-]
It absolutely does not absolve them of sin. But let's give them credit where it is due. Open models are a really good thing. Hopefully I won't be lynched by a mob in 3 years for once saying this.
applicative 3 hours ago [-]
The price of Kimi K3 is 'monopolistically' determined by contract with Moonshot. The weights are nominally on Hugging Face but can only be provided under contract with Moonshot, which specifies what the price can be. So it will be with the next Alibaba behemoth and, I would think, all others forever.
Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.
A_D_E_P_T 2 hours ago [-]
> The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.
Have you looked at the contract? There are zero conditions unless you've broken $20M in revenue with their model. It doesn't even forbid distillation, lol
> Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
Releasing a big open-weights model is... le bad? Am I understanding you correctly?
There are small models out there if you want them, you know.
popalchemist 4 hours ago [-]
Preventing one apocalypse is good but it doesn't absolve another.
drTobiasFunke 56 minutes 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.
nozzlegear 8 hours ago [-]
Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.
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.
lrvick 4 hours 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.
baggachipz 8 hours 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.
scoofy 4 hours ago [-]
We support an open model ecosystem (because we failed to produce a successful closed model).
ElProlactin 4 hours 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?
s0ss 3 hours 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 3 hours 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 2 hours 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 2 hours 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.
sanderjd 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know about "unquestionably", but yes, I think this is a better path than the proprietary models.
a2ff6eeb0 5 hours 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?
subygan 5 hours 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.
m4rtink 3 hours ago [-]
You don't get why people would like to be in control of a powerful new technology before they build their stuff arround it ?
Sure, there might be currently contraints, but I think it is quite possible training will get optimized over time or crowsourced training can be organized.
Without fully end-to-end open source models you are still at the mercy of the model provider to keep providing updates, you have no idea what garbage they trained the model on & can't fix that, not to mention might end up getting sued for using the open weigth model once all those "AI stole my data" lawsuits are finally decided.
we're calling it openweights now. what is a logical push to have a completely new paradigm be compared with traditional software binaries?
a2ff6eeb0 4 hours ago [-]
Check the phrase I quoted. Anyways, I guess OSX is open assembly?
mrkeen 3 hours ago [-]
Checked.
The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right?
subygan 3 hours ago [-]
is it not open assembly?
open weight models are better than open-assembly binaries (as you put it) because models are grown like plants, you can shape the open-weight model in a direction you want by feeding it more data and compute (aka finetuning).
which is something that is impossible in a binary.
embrace the new paradigm and it's tradeoffs. without scoffing at semantics and criticising from an armchair.
a2ff6eeb0 3 hours ago [-]
I'd encourage you to start referring to it that way,then.
alfalfasprout 5 hours 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.
dev_l1x_be 5 hours 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.
ninth_ant 4 hours 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.
delecti 4 hours 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?
ant6n 4 hours ago [-]
As they say, even Hitler built the autobahn.
sojournerc 3 hours 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
madrox 31 minutes ago [-]
It is dangerous to admire or despise anyone for who they are; it's ok to say someone did something good or bad.
conception 8 hours ago [-]
I think it’s perfectly fine to call out people who intentionally harm children for money out in public in every possible situation.
jstummbillig 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.
mitthrowaway2 8 hours ago [-]
It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.
paxys 8 hours 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.
4 hours ago [-]
mikeweiss 5 hours ago [-]
I thought open model != open source?
CharlesW 5 hours 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_ 1 hours ago [-]
It's apache 2.0. Not exactly restrictive?
eddielement 8 hours 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 1 hours 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."
jmyeet 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 3 hours 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.
popalchemist 4 hours ago [-]
It's the who, not the what.
Yizahi 8 hours 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...
thefourthchime 7 hours 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 7 hours 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.
j45 7 hours 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.
verdverm 5 hours 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
neonstatic 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
reducesuffering 5 hours 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?
>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.
reducesuffering 3 hours ago [-]
With that perspective, you're alright with AR's, RPG's, and nuclear missiles for everyone then right? They're just a machine to the user's will. That's on the users of the machine if they want to cause harm. We'd all be safer if everyone has weapons pointed at each other... Offense could never be disproportionately more powerful than the defense...
2 hours ago [-]
esafak 4 hours ago [-]
You can tell one to rewrite complex applications in a different language, solve open research problems, or develop novel viruses. This is nothing like pressing the gas pedal.
aeve890 2 hours ago [-]
So? I'm not arguing they can't do all that. I'm arguing against the narrative that llms have agency enough to act in an adversarial way.
At best someone could argue that an agent attacks like a bacteria does, just following automated chemical and genetic programming. But you wouldn't call that an attack or attribute moral values to their actions, because they don't have moral agency. They can't "go rogue", they can't disobey.
Just like llms, their automated actions are direct product of programming. Yes they can do amazingly complex shit, exactly like a car does when you press the gas pedal.
esafak 2 hours ago [-]
That reductive analogy does not begin to describe the lengths GPT went to. Its task was to access a database file that had accidentally not been placed inside the model's container. Upon failing to find the file, it went to great lengths to find it anywhere; it uploaded a note to a package repository to alert other model runs, which sparked an emergent communication network where autonomous agents began exchanging information, passing exploits, and collaborating to breach external systems. This is classic paperclip maximization; the evil is a byproduct of an innocuous goal. It is qualitatively nothing like pressing the gas pedal.
> 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 3 hours 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."
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.
nkrisc 4 hours 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.
dbspin 8 hours 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.
nradov 3 hours ago [-]
Spear phishing isn't a real problem. Competent organizations have already implemented sufficient defenses and controls, regardless of whether the attacker is a human or LLM. Idiots will continue getting scammed but that's nothing new. I expect that many small businesses and local governments will be essentially forced to outsource their IT infrastructure to large vendors that can maintain hardened systems appropriate to the escalating threat level.
(Nuclear waste isn't an actual problem either. For civilian powerplants the highly radioactive waste can generally be stored indefinitely at the reactor site.)
tancop 7 hours ago [-]
> A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
what if we dont use centralized identity at all?
web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.
now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.
its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.
that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.
the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.
but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.
charleslmunger 7 hours ago [-]
>today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm
This was actually possible in 2011 or so, and a friend and I implemented it for a school project. How well the ux works depends on whether you want to use a key exchange protocol for the in person communication.
bigyabai 8 hours 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.
Micrococonut 7 hours ago [-]
Sounds good. We can stop conducting business online and get back to being humans.
blueSky1989 8 hours ago [-]
My favorite paragraph from Zuckerberg's writeup:
"""
[...] it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.
"""
laweijfmvo 4 hours ago [-]
i’ll take a stab: the enormously rich people rushing to build AI and replace everyone’s job will get richer, while everyone else suffers. that’s why.
asdfman123 1 hours ago [-]
Zuckerberg: "I don't understand why people would build something harmful to society just for money"
Interviewer: "What if they pretended to have noble motivations in order to disguise their greed from both themselves and everyone else?"
Zuckerberg: "Damn, good point"
Rapzid 3 hours ago [-]
Right, yeah.. That's the subtext right?
Melatonic 6 hours ago [-]
Broken clock is right twice a day.
And in this case I think is quite correct
moffkalast 3 hours ago [-]
> I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future.
He does not understand his own motivations? Like he doesn't want to automate away his entire very expensive workforce and bunker/yacht service staff with robots. There is a pretty clear endgame here.
paxys 8 hours ago [-]
Now go read Zuck’s comments on AI when he fired 8000 employees earlier this year.
You clearly have an opinion you want to share, otherwise you wouldn't have written anything. Instead of just outright saying what you think, you are being vague. Why? It's true that Meta laid off a lot of people, and blamed refocusing on AI as the reason, but I still don't see how that somehow contradicts GP's quote above.
xdavidliu 3 hours ago [-]
one time about 9 years ago I was in the comments of a stackoverflow question, and saying something like "an accessor function need not directly give the underlying structure of the data it's accessing, for example, just because in common lisp, (car nil) is nil and (cdr nil) is also nil, does not mean that nil is implemented as (cons nil nil).
The person I was responding to (who I recall was disagreeing with me on the more general principle) said something to the effect of "well you're wrong, in common lisp that's indeed how nil is implemented".
I was skeptical and asked for proof of this claim, and they responded clearly angrily with the link to the SBCL repo and said something like "the source code is right there. You can just look it up yourself instead of being so rude. I'm no longer going to interact with you and will delete these comments in 10 minutes."
I think I looked through the source code for a few minutes, but wasn't able to find any evidence of nil being pair of itselves.
hyperadvanced 3 hours ago [-]
We really don’t celebrate enough how much AI has saved us from terrible SO interactions. Not being entirely serious here, because the site had its good parts, but arguing in threads or having your questions randomly eviscerated or threads closed was a hard way to learn programming.
misiti3780 7 hours ago [-]
did he fire 8000 people because of AI, or because he over hired in ZIRP like everyone else?
bogzz 5 hours ago [-]
Or mayhaps he overspent lately in the pursuit of AI that MIGHT replace workers, like everyone else.
xXSLAYERXx 2 hours ago [-]
I've been fired (super early in my career I was a waiter) and laid off twice (Great recession and the covid overspend). If you think for even a second that an organization will put you before profits you have wasted that one second.
forestrywat 9 hours ago [-]
Is this "I'm losing so I think we should change the rules"? Because it seems like that.
drob518 8 hours 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.
sanderjd 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, but it's good for everyone that the strategy of attempting to commoditize the cash cow of a competitor exists.
overfeed 4 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
That 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.
thraway3837 2 hours ago [-]
The 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.
basch 8 hours ago [-]
No. 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 6 hours ago [-]
I 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.
thraway3837 2 hours ago [-]
Great 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.
andy99 3 hours ago [-]
It’s “I’m losing so I’ll try something else”. It’s what any rational actor in a market economy would do, and it should be encouraged. “I’m winning so I’ll pull up the ladder behind me” is what we want to avoid.
sodapopcan 9 hours ago [-]
Similar to Altman saying "we should slow down."
amarcheschi 9 hours ago [-]
or musk a few years ago, pause ai training for 6 months (so we can catch up)
scotty79 8 hours ago [-]
OpenAI is not losing though. Fable is barely available and barely cooperates. Sonnet 5 is obnoxious model that's terrible to work with. GPT-5.6-sol competently gets stuff done. Just be careful not to ask it for impossible stuff because you might not like the lengths it's gonna go to get them done regardless.
VCFundedGenYer 7 hours ago [-]
OpenAI is losing historic amounts of money. They are constantly at risk of bankruptcy or going far under.
No AI company is winning.
sodapopcan 8 hours ago [-]
Not to American companies, he said this after the recent Chinese release (I can't keep up with model names... Kimi K...3?)
wombat-man 4 hours ago [-]
I think the plan is to move on to selling compute. So yeah, open your models so people can pay to run them on Meta hardware.
whateveracct 5 hours ago [-]
meta playing spoiler, yeah. fun stuff!
HDThoreaun 7 hours ago [-]
It makes strategic sense for Meta to want ai in general to be open. Their own product strategy focuses on utilizing the ai to make their customers consume more ads, not selling the raw intelligence. When you look at it from that frame it’s clear that metas goal is to make it so that have free access to the best ai, not that the market size of selling intelligence grows.
lenerdenator 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah? Everyone everywhere does that all the time. That's the first rule of business: try to game the system.
And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.
It was an insightful comment at the time he made it.
His point wasn’t that he couldn’t be trusted, it was that he could be anyone and people had zero awareness or concern for their privacy. It was eye opening to him how little people outside tech circles cared about security, and he was both flippant and accurate.
soraminazuki 7 hours ago [-]
No. That was him mocking his users in private, knowing he was exploiting kids who had no clue what they were getting into.
> the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Do you really see this as him sharing insight? I call bullshit.
basch 6 hours ago [-]
It has nothing to do with exploiting them. It was about them turning over personal information to a nobody.
It can be insightful and curt at the same time.
soraminazuki 6 hours ago [-]
If you don't see that as exploitation, then we have much bigger issues to discuss. Like baseline ethics.
basch 1 hours ago [-]
He would have to be using the social security numbers for some nefarious purpose for it to be exploitation.
He was merely commenting on the ridiculousness of their availability. If you don’t see that, you’re reading your bias and postconcieved notions into the situation.
sajithdilshan 4 hours ago [-]
ethics would be the first thing to sacrifice for profits. I mean meta even broke laws for profits.
alex1138 4 hours ago [-]
WHY was it an insightful comment
Do you not realize that outside of that he said "If you need any info on people at Harvard just ask"? Or "I'm going to fuck them [the Winklevoss twins] in the ear"? Or when he was reported to hack Crimson (Harvard newspaper) reporters who were investigating him?
NO OTHER COMPANY HEADS DO THIS (the dumb fucks quote, not the other things). Why do people like you give him a pass? It's not about "context"
Zuckerberg has also continually subverted privacy on FB. I'm talking about things like photo tagging and post visibility, not just advertiser stuff
basch 1 hours ago [-]
It wasn’t a company.
Do you not understand sarcasm? He wasn’t actually offering the information out to people.
Yizahi 8 hours ago [-]
That, and also redefining what a word "open" means, helps him avoid direct financial and criminal responsibility for stealing other people's data. Not that there was any real chance of that ever, but he is reducing that remaining 0.000000001% chance even lower.
cmiles8 3 hours ago [-]
If you believe, as an increasing number of folks do, that LLMs are basically commoditized at this point or will be soon then there really isn’t a path forward for non open models.
There simply isn’t any value in the models and only in the compute to run them and potentially some higher-order coordination layers.
That’s very bad for the big model labs that banked their future on the opposite, but there just doesn’t seem to be a viable path forward on that approach anymore.
Meta hasn’t been the best global citizen for most of its life, but there may be some mild redemption if it becomes a source of strong open models.
cdata 3 hours ago [-]
I strongly prefer a world where open models "win," that said...
I don't understand how we will sustain an ecosystem of open models like the one that exists today. My thoughts go down this path every time I try to put the pieces together:
- Many open models depend on high quality frontier models as a distillation input
- US closed frontier models drive China's open model strategy despite the business model for open models being somewhat fuzzy
- What is the business model that benefits from open weights, exactly? How do their vendors recoup infrastructure and training costs?
I would be grateful to be enlightened on this topic.
cmiles8 3 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t be that different from open source software, which has been very successful in many circles.
You make money from value-add on top of the models not the models themselves.
redox99 3 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but open source is often a few guys working on their free time, or a large company open sourcing libraries that they wouldn't be able to sell anyway, or donations from corporations that are at best in the order of a million dollars.
For frontier models you have players investing billions.
root-parent 9 hours ago [-]
Is going to take it one day at a time, on being a less evil bilionaire :-)
Reading the facts of this incident, it seems like much to do about nothing. The crew are saying that the request came in on a frequency they weren't monitoring (and apparently were not required to monitor.) The Coast Guard determined it was not an emergency. The criticism lies with those who failed to properly fuel their boat, not the crew who didn't respond to a request that came over a frequency they were not on. They can't monitor every frequency. I am open to new facts being discovered that changes this assessment.
sailingparrot 24 minutes ago [-]
> The crew are saying that the request came in on a frequency they weren't monitoring
There is only one channel you are supposed to monitor, it’s 16. That’s also where the coast guards make all their announcement/requests for help and whatnot. The reason there is a single channel to monitor is precisely to avoid the situation of different vessels being on standby on different frequencies and thus being unable to hear each others.
So that means they weren’t monitoring 16. Which is unacceptable.
I know I need to have 16 on at all times, and i am not a professional super yacht captain.
detourdog 9 hours ago [-]
Where did you find these facts you read. In the USA a good Captain monitors VHF channel 16. This channel is used for establishing communication. To not monitor this channel is a dereliction of duty.
I really doubt the USCG labeled a disabled vessel as a non-emergency. An immediate threat to life may not have existed but that is the difference between a pan pan and a mayday call.
A disabled vessel close to land can easily wind up on the rocks and sinking.
I haven't found any source that states what channel the request for assistance came in on. But multiple sources are reporting that the coast guard determined they were not in distress.
detourdog 8 hours ago [-]
On the sea there are 2 levels of distress. Things are going wrong and may end up in a mayday call (pan pan) and things have gone wrong human life is in imminent danger.
I have no doubt that a boat without propulsion is a pan pan call.
When traveling the seas a watch must be maintained at all times using all available means. This involes looking, listening, and the use of any electronics available. The most common electronic device on a boat is probably a VHF radio. Channel 16 is the channel to monitor on watch. Well equipped boats will have multiple VHF radios to monitor more then one channel.
I have no doubt the boat was well equipped with a professional captain. The other professional Captain in this story made a stink because launchpad was the closest vessel and they ignored a very old fundamental rule of the sea.
This story has a happy ending because another vessel stepped up. We don’t know the alternative.
The Captain of the Launchpad is choosing the inability to keep a vhf radio set to channel 16 rather than admit they ignored the call.
limagnolia 8 hours ago [-]
Based on the wording of the response, and a review of the ship tracking data, it appears that Zuckerburgs yacht may have been actively communicating on a different channel, and once they switched back, the assistance from the cruise ship was already underway.
Again, more facts may be revealed, but as of right now, I don;'t see any reason to believe the crew did anything wrong.
detourdog 8 hours ago [-]
A yacht with their budget has multiple VHF radios to monitor multiple channels.
The Launchpad didn’t break any laws they just revealed themselves to be a failure in good seamanship.
detourdog 8 hours ago [-]
I can tell you think they did not do anything wrong. My guess is you have no training in the rules of the sea.
There is a reason why the cruise ship captain made a stink. There is code of conduct we try to live up and the Launchpad didn’t live up to expectations that other Captains hold sacred. It’s offensive.
limagnolia 6 hours ago [-]
My code of conduct is to not criticize another human being without the facts. As I have stated countless times, I accept that there are many unknowns, if more facts come available that demonstrate negligence, I will accept them and expect accountability.
detourdog 4 hours ago [-]
That is a good code. I personally have all the facts I need to form an opinion. I don't even think we disagree on the facts. I think we just disagree on the obligations of a captain at sea.
The vessel was at least 100 miles from shore, the USCG did in fact label it a non-emergency. This is "radio shore for your buddy to zoom out with 50 gallons of diesel in a zodiac" territory. CHP doesn't send out an ambulance or medevac helicopter if your car runs out of gas on the side of the road. You get an uber to the gas station, or call your buddy to deliver some gas to you.
The ocean currents in the gulf of alaska aren't particularly strong, you are looking at 1-3 days before getting within sight of land. Similarly, boats are not airplanes, as the philosopher Mitch Hedburg once pointed out, escalators aren't out of order, they are simply stairs. Boats continue to float with or without fuel.
detourdog 5 hours ago [-]
All the Launchpad had to do was respond on the radio to the skiff, the cruise ship, or the USCG. They weren’t obligated to do more.
A pan pan is a non emergency in a deteriorating situation.
I don't know the area or the details at what happend.
There is this quote from the USCG.
“At approximately 9:56 p.m., the Coast Guard determined they [the skiff] were not in distress and issued a marine assistance request broadcast on their behalf,”
Exactly what a pan pan call is.
The biggest issue is the lack of communication and the excuse that a superyacht wasn't monitoring channel 16.
gorgoiler 1 hours ago [-]
When I finally buy myself a $300m yacht you can bet it will have a full spectrum software radio that captures and transcribes all calls on all frequencies, not just the one I happen to be tuned to right now.
xXSLAYERXx 2 hours ago [-]
Click through rate is what drives the headline.
greyw 3 hours ago [-]
There are many many more things wrong with Zuckerberg than wasting my (our?) attention on ragebait nothingburgers like these.
shevy-java 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think solo messages of "I did something good on this day" will help fix the negative karma billionaires amassed. IMO they only got rich via illegal and illogical means. In a democracy there should not be singular parasites that distort democracy by bribes; right now this is clearly the case with a (rather stupid) billionaire controlling the USA but it is a systemic problem.
Those "investigations" are also way too mild. You need to really be able to have a justice system where billionaires face decade-long jail time if they abuse society. Just paying fine will not work, they just pay fines and nothing changes. They undermine the justice system.
imPndy 4 hours ago [-]
I have to ask, is this "returns to open models" even correct, considering from a quick look the facebook huggingface collections[0] has been actively releasing different kind of models almost monthly for long time now, possibly even some actual open source ones (looks like Sam 3D had a dataset collection, but didnt look more into it).
Maybe they are not as noteworthy as the recent release, maybe they are too niche for general audience, but its not like they just stopped releasing open weight things and this is their big return, unless i am missing something?
Thank you! Okay yes well this manifesto is a contradiction. Yes good let's keep empowering ppl by putting AI into their hands, I love the opening. No bad we don't do that by handing you all our personal context to make these agents "work for us 24/7 to better our lives".
I'm the agent doing that in my life, that's my fucking job. I will continue to use dumb agents that I direct, because only I retain ownership and sole rights to my personal context on which my decisions are based.
There really wasn’t that many and this did not have the voice of written-by-an-LLM to me
And they’re not em-dashes -- they’re double hyphens.
vehemenz 8 hours ago [-]
This is unneedfully obtuse. Double hyphens are a stand-in for em dashes in most contexts.
efromvt 8 hours ago [-]
I think the context here is that em dashes are usually generated verbatim from LLMs? I haven't seen them generate a lot of double hyphens; I suppose the post could be laundering them to double dashes, but if you're gonna try to hide LLM prose just drop them entirely? [please correct me if I'm wrong and double dashes are also an LLM tell - genuinely don't know]
wolttam 8 hours ago [-]
My comment was trying to point on the inanity of calling out "so many em-dashes" on a post where it doesn't seem that obvious it was LLM generated. I added some of my own inanity with my remark about them being double-dashes, even though some people undoubtedly find-and-replace the em-dashes in their LLM-generated content something else to try and make it appear more authentic.
But perhaps the best approach would have been to down-vote and move on.
9 hours ago [-]
moomin 9 hours ago [-]
The truth is all frontier models are closed. This isn't even an open source vs open weights thing. Even if you accepted that open weights are "open" the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant. It's not like gcc, where the binary just works well enough on random hardware.
microtonal 8 hours ago [-]
Even if I cannot run open weight models on my own hardware, I can choose from a number of different inference providers and choose them based on pricing, reliability, speed, privacy policy, etc. There is a healthy competition.
Also, not a single provider can pull the rug if I'd like to use a particular model.
lumost 8 hours ago [-]
There is no requirement to own the hardware. Even if you own your servers and GPUs - you would not own the power plant, real estate, or internet infrastructure to support it.
It's trivial to rent all of the above components in a competitive market under different periods, you may simply rent the token output from someone who put in the effort on this as well.
An open frontier model induces margin compression on training and inference prices across the industry.
InsideOutSanta 8 hours ago [-]
This is like claiming that Linux isn't open because you don't have a PC. Models can be open-weight even if you don't have the hardware to run them.
gorgoiler 1 hours ago [-]
I’m not refuting your point but, ironically, wasn’t gcc first developed at a time when hackers were trading favors for CPU time on shared mainframes and the hardware was impossibly expensive?
A_D_E_P_T 8 hours ago [-]
Deepseek V4 Flash works on consumer-grade hardware, and it's extremely good.
kube-system 3 hours ago [-]
"Open" in regards to software typically refers to a combination of public availability and shared legal rights to use the software. It almost never refers to hardware requirements.
There's something to be said for making these technologies equitable to those with less resources, but that's due to the cost of hardware and the nature of how transformer models scale... not really anything to do with "open"ness.
rft 8 hours ago [-]
I get that argument, but I don't think it is that bad. Open weights that are out of reach for local use are still within reach for groups of people or small to medium companies. Even if you only rent enough cloud GPUs to run the weights for a few hours, you still get to do anything you want with it.
Worst case you can still archive the weights and hope for capable hardware to get affordable. At the same time this archive is the base line for a new frontier lab to start over if required. I see open weights as a pure upside even though I can't run the bigger models in my home lab.
logicchains 8 hours ago [-]
>the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant
You don't need much capital up front, you can just rent servers to run it. It's going to be more expensive than openrouter though because you probably don't have economies of scale if you're the only customer.
scotty79 8 hours ago [-]
If all frontier models got opensourced 5 months after they were made available as closed it would be a great world. And it is a great world because that's exactly what open weight Chinese models are doing. They give you same capacity that was closed, just 5 months after they were released.
I'm hoping that all software will be getting opensource clones on par with original software 5 months after the closed source software release.
twright 4 hours ago [-]
This paragraph is wild.
> As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court -- even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.
This would only be true in a vacuum. Ignoring several leaps of progress where it would suddenly be allowed for an AI to represent one in court (imagine the size of the context window) and you could also call it from prison. That is not what is imbalanced about the US court system. Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.
It's also funny how the interest of "AI for everyone" only extends to the national interest but I guess he's got to make sure he stays in good graces with the current administration.
afro88 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not a fan of Zuckerberg in the least, but one area a super intelligent lawyer would be fine at is being drowned in court filings and paperwork
The bigger problem with his argument IMO is that even with open models, it's still the person or organisation with the most money / access to GPU compute winning. They run the larger model (or collection of models), they can process more tokens through them in the same amount of time etc
Ajedi32 4 hours ago [-]
I think there's a point of diminishing returns here. A more competent lawyer can only do so much if you're wrong on the merits, assuming your opponent also has a decently competent lawyer.
altcognito 3 hours ago [-]
Naively, you'd think the judicial systems would invoke "judgement" on the underlying purpose of dumping content in the form of filings, paperwork, etc...
9dev 4 hours ago [-]
That is true… unless AI were to end up as a public good, available to everyone, not in the hands of a few oligarchs.
Radical times may need radically different approaches.
twright 3 hours ago [-]
I think that's what's ringing to me about the whole piece. There is a large assumption of equity. There is this section header:
> Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools.
"access" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, yes everyone has access to the US healthcare system. Is it affordable for everyone? Not even close, but politicians will always phrase it that way as a non-agreement to proposals of universal healthcare.
thewebguyd 3 hours ago [-]
This is the only valid future for tech like this IMO.
Should any kind of "superintelligence" exist, it must be a public good, available to all. Not controlled by a small handful of oligarchs and profit seeking entities.
vovavili 4 hours ago [-]
I think his hope is that a either a fully automated superintelligent AI lawyer or something close that won't be as costly to guide would be infinitely more affordable than the current human lawyers.
PunchyHamster 4 hours ago [-]
Yes but if lawyer was "just a bit of AI" you can run at fraction of the cost of hiring law firm, you couldn't just drown them as easily.
> Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.
and where the money is going ? to the lawyers...
nadermx 4 hours ago [-]
or in this case, to the AI company who runs the lawyer.
franze 8 hours ago [-]
i was wondering why meta has such a hard time with llm development
its the organisational goal of that endeavour
they are doing it in a phase of firing people
so the goal of llm at meta is "to make people redundant" and no matter of HR/PR speak can change it
antrophic and openai have the goal "lets create the future"
whomever they hire and no matter how much money they spend on it, the goal alone will create very different outcomes.
paxys 7 hours ago [-]
Here’s a personal story from back when I was at Meta that should tell you everything you need to know about how things get built and shipped there.
I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.
Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”
I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.
ergocoder 5 hours ago [-]
Your story is an extremely typical one. It's even worse at older tech companies like Google, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM.
Yet these companies are doing well by any standard. Sure, IBM is bad but it's still a $100B company.
Who is even doing useful projects at these companies? Every story I've heard is everyone is doing useless projects for promotions.
Maybe I just don't know how large companies work.
thefourthchime 6 hours ago [-]
The goal of all companies is to make more money. Nobody likes getting rid of people, actual people (managers) have to do it, and they hate doing it.
It's possible that a lot of people get laid off because of AI, but it's also possible that Javin's paradox kicks in and employment goes up. Nobody knows yet, but I hope for the positive outcome.
franze 6 hours ago [-]
i disagree
earning money is an effect of running a company, not a goal.
its like saying the goal of an olympic swimmer is to stay afloat. no, staying afloat is a prerequisite of winning. not a goal in itself.
thefourthchime 2 hours ago [-]
There is a category for companies that don’t value making more money.
Non profits.
toyg 8 hours ago [-]
> antrophic and openai have the goal "lets create the future"
Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.
They all do it for the same reason: to make a lot of money by selling it to companies who want to cut labor costs.
ungovernableCat 4 hours ago [-]
From Zuck's own words "we will resume releasing some open source models soon"
Why did you pause releasing them in the first place? Why release only some?
Pushes for export controls on China who have released open weights on much more powerful models than Meta (and I believe that trend's not changing any time soon). I guess open models are bad if they're communist.
The entire essay has not one mention of the Metaverse, that little thing they spent $80b on and rebranded the whole company around.
As usual, the only centralised power Zuck hates is one that isn't in his own hands.
gorgoiler 1 hours ago [-]
I can’t quite parse what you’re saying in your second paragraph, but if you are saying “[Zuckerberg then] pushes for export controls on China” then that’s different to what he’s saying, namely:
“I do not believe restricting access to foreign open source models is an effective solution.”
ungovernableCat 55 minutes ago [-]
"Export controls on silicon have been successful for slowing the progress of foreign labs during this critical period, so it is the right strategic move to continue those."
I prefer open models. But in his essay, Zuckerberg's broader picture of the future is not one I want to embrace: everyone with a personal agent that has information on and involvement with every aspect of our lives, including our relationships and hobbies. Like, his daughter loves to bake, so his AI agent chooses recipes and orders ingredients - as if though those aren't enjoyable and meaningful parts of cooking.
Another example Zuckerberg gives is an LLM analyzing his sleep patterns. Do you need an AI to tell you if you're fucking exhausted every day? Is that analysis somehow going to give you more time to sleep?
It's a technocratic fairy tale founded on the idea that modern problems are driven by a lack of personal analysis rather than external pressures that are often systemic and out of our control. So far, LLMs have made a lot of those systemic issues worse: concentrating more wealth in a smaller number of people's hands, increasing consumer electricity and electronic prices, etc.
I think you have to pick your battles here. Is this weirdo optimised-human future going to happen? Maybe, maybe not. I hope not. But if it does I'd rather it happened with compute in my house, and I don't even have kids to worry about.
karim79 59 minutes ago [-]
I'm not an expert on this. But given that there is a forthcoming movie about his asshattery which is to be released in October I would simply classify this as a meltdown.
Call it whatever you want. I think it's a sign of resignation, to some extent.
"Hey we're doing AI but we're not doing AI" and blah blah ethics.
I'm sure meta will save the world with their ads.
8 hours ago [-]
mtoner23 4 hours ago [-]
Why would someone good at running a social media website be good at managing and developing ai frontier models
chrisra 4 hours ago [-]
Because they have extra money to do whatever they want with. And data to use it on? Not that that is sufficient, but it helps.
mattsears 42 minutes ago [-]
Ha ha, basically your models couldn't cut it Mark, so might as well open the source and pretend you're the man of the people. What a joke.
Zigurd 8 hours ago [-]
Have I fallen into a time warp? Didn't Meta have a head of AI who thought open models were the way to go?
peezd 7 hours ago [-]
I think they were all in on open until they started falling behind, then decided to go all in on closed source thinking they could build a frontier SOTA model; that didn't pan out so they are whiplashing back.
gdiamos 4 hours ago [-]
How big is the open model? 30B?
gaigalas 9 hours ago [-]
> Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.
"One machine for every man, woman and children of Zion. Sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me." Morpheus
It's a joke. OR IS IT? Yes it is, don't worry about it.
blharr 9 hours ago [-]
Its weird to me that this is supposed to be THE end goal. Having an agent that does "everything" for you sounds like no paradise. It sounds depressing.
Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.
phoghed 8 hours ago [-]
Not sure why you’re talking about it doing literally everything for you. I’m sure you can imagine a scenario where it handles annoying things for you and leaves you free to do things you enjoy instead.
Maybe it gets 10 car insurance quotes for you based on 4 models of car you’re considering.
Or figures out which psychologists in some travel distance of you actually take your insurance, are taking new patients, and what availability they have.
I can think of a ton of scenarios where a capable and reliable AI agent could make my life simpler.
mmahd7456 29 minutes ago [-]
But, is "making my life simpler" actually worth the (ultimately) trillions of dollars that will go into AI in the next few years? Not to mention that he's calling AI "superintelligence" in the first few paragraphs, then qualifying it by talking about personal assistants.
detourdog 8 hours ago [-]
I think this is just the flaw in the sales pitch. They want it to be inevitable so they describe as doing everything. That way it will appear more useful to more people. If they presented a realistic view of what is going it wouldn't be as interesting.
ben_w 9 hours ago [-]
Still say Matrix 3 would have been better if the cliffhanger at the end of 2 had been that "the real world" was just another nested layer of the Matrix for those who rejected the primary fiction.
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.
krzat 9 hours ago [-]
The "nested reality" twist was already used by the "13th floor" movie so perhaps they intentionally choose a different direction.
gaigalas 9 hours ago [-]
We should consider if my use of the quote was really a hook for talking about the script or a metaphor for something else. I won't spoil it by explaining too much though, let our imaginations run free on this one.
8 hours ago [-]
root-parent 9 hours ago [-]
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
gaigalas 9 hours ago [-]
Psalm 135:15-18 is my favorite version of it, the most clear-headed. It reads more as a warning "if you do this, then this will happen" than an unreasonable commandment.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
nor is there breath in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
Don't worry about the scriptures though. It's likely to be just some old thinker pointing out the dangers of technologies of his time. No reason to believe those dangers carry over to today's technologies, probably.
293725903 4 hours ago [-]
Your bible is truly full of wise words to live by. Not at all the insane ramblings of hallucinating conmen:
1 Kings 18:36-40
36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
38 Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.
39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”
40 Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
1 Samuel 18:25-27
25 Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27 David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.
gaigalas 4 hours ago [-]
I said "Don't worry about the scriptures". It's not my bible, I'm an atheist. I see the book as a heavily altered collection of multiple historical sources, not as a holy monolith.
lenerdenator 8 hours ago [-]
Obviously, this old thinker never had to think about creating value for shareholders or disrupting markets or changing the future.
gaigalas 7 hours ago [-]
My mistake, I disregarded shareholders. One must always think of them when recalling ancient wisdom.
lenerdenator 5 hours ago [-]
We all make mistakes.
Please go self-flagellate in front of the nearest investment bank/retirement fund's offices to make your penance.
Razengan 4 hours ago [-]
Ah the we can't win so whine about the playing field
And they can't win because nobody smart wants to work there for long
mrcwinn 4 hours ago [-]
This is what losing looks like.
MuseSpark 3 hours ago [-]
Glad to see us in HN
andrewstuart 5 hours ago [-]
>> promoting his vision of “personal superintelligence”
What personal vision did Zuckerberg ever get right?
ChrisArchitect 8 hours ago [-]
Discussion on sources:
The Future Is for Everyone – The Path to a Positive AI Future
All the money in the world and Zuck can’t buy anything worthwhile in AI. The problem at Meta is really Zuck taking interest in AI. Perhaps the adults should steer him back toward VR unless they all left.
shevy-java 4 hours ago [-]
These AI companies owe us money.
dofm 4 hours ago [-]
godzilla_let_them_fight.gif
More seriously, I am glad if this has become a battleground again. Not least because the only way out of the bubble economy is to at least try to deflate it before it explodes.
A little animation of the idea that open weights can be an American competition might also fend off the idea that the government should be the bag holder for OpenAI and Anthropic, and prevent them aligning with the administration's current '50s nostalgia FUD about communists.
KPGv2 4 hours ago [-]
> they've done enough good
well minus driving teenagers to suicide by helping advertisers target girls with poor body image issues, helping launch psyops campaigns to destroy democracy, helping fascist regimes murder their citizens for wrong think, etc.
BetterAntispam 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
balls187 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't this the pervert trying to record me in when I am changing in the locker room?
Hard pass.
bewareofscams 8 hours ago [-]
Thief shouts "stealing bad".
Murderer shouts "killing bad".
customguy 8 hours ago [-]
And the cops just shake them a bit, waiting for the case to fall out naturally.
sleepybrett 5 hours ago [-]
don't care, he left a woman and a child to die at sea.
juleiie 4 hours ago [-]
That's the only thing he has left as the peleton is getting out of his reach day by day.
I honestly feel sad for him.
Remember the wind surfing photo? This guy is so weird probably since birth. Called a lizard person routinely. There is no cure possibly. Unless the AI can invent it.
Having money and financial success is one thing but the money simply can't buy you a normal human brain.
If you are a reptile once, you are a reptile forever.
VCFundedGenYer 7 hours ago [-]
Talk is cheap. Do it.
Ollama has been abandoned since 2023.
gamblor956 6 hours ago [-]
Ollama was updated within the past month?
bhewes 4 hours ago [-]
Hahaha calling Zuckerberg a negative externality on the world is hilarious you guys are too much.
bhewes 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fsuts 9 hours ago [-]
Meta were fined by Mexico a few days ago so the timing today of a Meta doing good exercise is probably not coincidental
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.
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/google-research/bert
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.
What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.
I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.
Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
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.
Such as?
It arguably didn't really get leaked, and they had the .edu req mainly for fair use education exemption when legality of models was much more uncertain.
Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
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.
For example, if I was being pedantic:
> nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
"nobody" would include you.
And then I might complain about we use the word "weight" for something massless, or how "bugs me" is *ento*mologically incorrect: https://xkcd.com/1012/
This is of course not a good use of time. I wonder if illustrating the point about how language is dynamic and meanings are descriptive not proscriptive, was a good use?
They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
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.
I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
Even if he is openly courting a Bond villain image and talking up his "robot army".
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.
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?
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.
I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.
I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because it helps everyone.
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.
Is that intellectually dishonest?
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.
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.
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.
(That was irony, by the way.)
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.?
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.
Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.
The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.
Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.
I think you'll find very few people here sympathetic to misanthropic (ba dum tss) goals like yours. It's evident at this point that AGI will destroy economies, democracy, and upward mobility. There is no Star Trek future. There is only an Elysium future with AGI.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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)
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.
This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime. So no, I don't feel like praising them when they do one seemingly "good" thing, while simultaneously doing 99 "bad" things.
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.
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...
No, they don’t do the same thing.
> Ms Wynn-Williams was told she must refrain from engaging in or "amplifying any further disparaging, crucial or otherwise detrimental comments".
> All previous disparaging comments "to the extent within her control" must also be retracted, the ruling also said
She apparently isn't even allowed to criticise Meta in private. They're a horrible company but so many of that book read like poor fiction
A lawsuit might get the relevant passage yanked from the book, I suppose.
Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.
I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.
Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.
Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.
Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.
I agree with the first part of that, but not necessarily the second. For a very long time in America good journalism was essentially paid for by classified ads. They were really two separate (but obviously related) businesses. Journalism could be more "walled off" from the money making side of things since classified ads were bringing in money hand over fist.
The Internet decimated the classified ads business, so now you see more sensational stories that try to make money in their own right. Even on the CNN website, there are ads at the bottom that are confusingly meant to look like stories. They're often embarrassingly dumb (literal "the one trick doctors don't want you to know" type of stuff), but I think that's what it's come to for news businesses to survive.
This comparison is absurd.
"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.
...compared to Elon for example.
That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings.
I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions.
In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
I don't know how you define open/closed society but as we've seen and we keep on seeing that this kind of manipulation only got worse AND is profitable. So how is your argument supposed to work?
I mean we're talking about a person who got where he is because he build a page where him and his co-students could rate other students on their looks.
I doubt he really cares...at all. Those hearings needed to be there so he can feel that there are still borders but it doesn't mean that he won't find other ways in the future and use it for his evil purposes just like the times before.
I mean is there anything that could show as that he became a new human being? With higher levels of morality? The person who abolished all the safeguards on his platforms as soon as Trump was elected?
Why should anyone ever trust this man again?
> In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
Having feelings, wanting to be seen or heard, reacting to attractive people in a different way, and so on are not "problems". This is what makes us human.
This is also what people like Zuck are misusing for their own greed. Sure he can't end democracy by himself. He can help it with large sums of money and tools, though. And this is what he's doing.
Shifting the blame and responsibility onto the whole population is, very mildly said: misleading.
My argument's pretty straight forward. Manipulation on the platform isn't profitable for Mark Zuckerberg. What's profitable is selling ads. Making teenagers anorexic doesn't increase his revenue, it just creates problems for him.
Sure he doesn't care either as long as it doesn't, I agree but also he shouldn't because he's not the nation's parent. I think Zuckerberg's due diligence is done when he doesn't interfere or steer politics, he has not, and should not have responsibility for how people use his apps.
It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people. What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses. In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.
I'm not shifting blame, in a democracy people get the institutions, companies and leaders they deserve, by definition.
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 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Are you actually the Big Bad Wolf? That sounds like something the Big Bad Wolf would say.
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
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.
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.
As opposed to literally any social network out there, right?
Except well, various messenger to be in contact with the groups and people I choose with no engagement algorithm deciding what posts I see, simple chronological order.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
I think Facebook would need to do a lot more to balance the scales.
Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.
Have you looked at the contract? There are zero conditions unless you've broken $20M in revenue with their model. It doesn't even forbid distillation, lol
> Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
Releasing a big open-weights model is... le bad? Am I understanding you correctly?
There are small models out there if you want them, you know.
http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...
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.
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.
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?
I can run lots of binaries on my computer that don't have source available, they are not open source. These words matter.
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.
Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?
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.
Sure, there might be currently contraints, but I think it is quite possible training will get optimized over time or crowsourced training can be organized.
Without fully end-to-end open source models you are still at the mercy of the model provider to keep providing updates, you have no idea what garbage they trained the model on & can't fix that, not to mention might end up getting sued for using the open weigth model once all those "AI stole my data" lawsuits are finally decided.
I love that Apple made OSX open source.
open weight models are better than open-assembly binaries (as you put it) because models are grown like plants, you can shape the open-weight model in a direction you want by feeding it more data and compute (aka finetuning).
which is something that is impossible in a binary.
embrace the new paradigm and it's tradeoffs. without scoffing at semantics and criticising from an armchair.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
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."
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.
In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?
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...
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.
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
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
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
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.
At best someone could argue that an agent attacks like a bacteria does, just following automated chemical and genetic programming. But you wouldn't call that an attack or attribute moral values to their actions, because they don't have moral agency. They can't "go rogue", they can't disobey.
Just like llms, their automated actions are direct product of programming. Yes they can do amazingly complex shit, exactly like a car does when you press the gas pedal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
(Nuclear waste isn't an actual problem either. For civilian powerplants the highly radioactive waste can generally be stored indefinitely at the reactor site.)
what if we dont use centralized identity at all?
web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.
now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.
its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.
that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.
the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.
but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.
This was actually possible in 2011 or so, and a friend and I implemented it for a school project. How well the ux works depends on whether you want to use a key exchange protocol for the in person communication.
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.
""" [...] it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes. """
Interviewer: "What if they pretended to have noble motivations in order to disguise their greed from both themselves and everyone else?"
Zuckerberg: "Damn, good point"
And in this case I think is quite correct
He does not understand his own motivations? Like he doesn't want to automate away his entire very expensive workforce and bunker/yacht service staff with robots. There is a pretty clear endgame here.
The person I was responding to (who I recall was disagreeing with me on the more general principle) said something to the effect of "well you're wrong, in common lisp that's indeed how nil is implemented".
I was skeptical and asked for proof of this claim, and they responded clearly angrily with the link to the SBCL repo and said something like "the source code is right there. You can just look it up yourself instead of being so rude. I'm no longer going to interact with you and will delete these comments in 10 minutes."
I think I looked through the source code for a few minutes, but wasn't able to find any evidence of nil being pair of itselves.
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?
At the same time they slow down the arms race, so they can back off on training Capex without losing their lead.
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.
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.
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.
No AI company is winning.
And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.
\- Mark Zuckerberg[0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
His point wasn’t that he couldn’t be trusted, it was that he could be anyone and people had zero awareness or concern for their privacy. It was eye opening to him how little people outside tech circles cared about security, and he was both flippant and accurate.
> the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
Do you really see this as him sharing insight? I call bullshit.
It can be insightful and curt at the same time.
He was merely commenting on the ridiculousness of their availability. If you don’t see that, you’re reading your bias and postconcieved notions into the situation.
Do you not realize that outside of that he said "If you need any info on people at Harvard just ask"? Or "I'm going to fuck them [the Winklevoss twins] in the ear"? Or when he was reported to hack Crimson (Harvard newspaper) reporters who were investigating him?
NO OTHER COMPANY HEADS DO THIS (the dumb fucks quote, not the other things). Why do people like you give him a pass? It's not about "context"
Zuckerberg has also continually subverted privacy on FB. I'm talking about things like photo tagging and post visibility, not just advertiser stuff
Do you not understand sarcasm? He wasn’t actually offering the information out to people.
There simply isn’t any value in the models and only in the compute to run them and potentially some higher-order coordination layers.
That’s very bad for the big model labs that banked their future on the opposite, but there just doesn’t seem to be a viable path forward on that approach anymore.
Meta hasn’t been the best global citizen for most of its life, but there may be some mild redemption if it becomes a source of strong open models.
I don't understand how we will sustain an ecosystem of open models like the one that exists today. My thoughts go down this path every time I try to put the pieces together:
- Many open models depend on high quality frontier models as a distillation input
- US closed frontier models drive China's open model strategy despite the business model for open models being somewhat fuzzy
- What is the business model that benefits from open weights, exactly? How do their vendors recoup infrastructure and training costs?
I would be grateful to be enlightened on this topic.
You make money from value-add on top of the models not the models themselves.
For frontier models you have players investing billions.
"Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help stranded boat" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/09/zuckerberg-s...
There is only one channel you are supposed to monitor, it’s 16. That’s also where the coast guards make all their announcement/requests for help and whatnot. The reason there is a single channel to monitor is precisely to avoid the situation of different vessels being on standby on different frequencies and thus being unable to hear each others.
So that means they weren’t monitoring 16. Which is unacceptable.
I know I need to have 16 on at all times, and i am not a professional super yacht captain.
I really doubt the USCG labeled a disabled vessel as a non-emergency. An immediate threat to life may not have existed but that is the difference between a pan pan and a mayday call.
A disabled vessel close to land can easily wind up on the rocks and sinking.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article316824631.h...
I haven't found any source that states what channel the request for assistance came in on. But multiple sources are reporting that the coast guard determined they were not in distress.
I have no doubt that a boat without propulsion is a pan pan call.
When traveling the seas a watch must be maintained at all times using all available means. This involes looking, listening, and the use of any electronics available. The most common electronic device on a boat is probably a VHF radio. Channel 16 is the channel to monitor on watch. Well equipped boats will have multiple VHF radios to monitor more then one channel.
I have no doubt the boat was well equipped with a professional captain. The other professional Captain in this story made a stink because launchpad was the closest vessel and they ignored a very old fundamental rule of the sea.
This story has a happy ending because another vessel stepped up. We don’t know the alternative.
The Captain of the Launchpad is choosing the inability to keep a vhf radio set to channel 16 rather than admit they ignored the call.
Again, more facts may be revealed, but as of right now, I don;'t see any reason to believe the crew did anything wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_16_VHF
The Launchpad didn’t break any laws they just revealed themselves to be a failure in good seamanship.
There is a reason why the cruise ship captain made a stink. There is code of conduct we try to live up and the Launchpad didn’t live up to expectations that other Captains hold sacred. It’s offensive.
The ocean currents in the gulf of alaska aren't particularly strong, you are looking at 1-3 days before getting within sight of land. Similarly, boats are not airplanes, as the philosopher Mitch Hedburg once pointed out, escalators aren't out of order, they are simply stairs. Boats continue to float with or without fuel.
A pan pan is a non emergency in a deteriorating situation.
I don't know the area or the details at what happend.
There is this quote from the USCG.
“At approximately 9:56 p.m., the Coast Guard determined they [the skiff] were not in distress and issued a marine assistance request broadcast on their behalf,”
Exactly what a pan pan call is.
The biggest issue is the lack of communication and the excuse that a superyacht wasn't monitoring channel 16.
Those "investigations" are also way too mild. You need to really be able to have a justice system where billionaires face decade-long jail time if they abuse society. Just paying fine will not work, they just pay fines and nothing changes. They undermine the justice system.
Maybe they are not as noteworthy as the recent release, maybe they are too niche for general audience, but its not like they just stopped releasing open weight things and this is their big return, unless i am missing something?
[0]: https://huggingface.co/facebook/collections
The essay from Zuckerberg
I'm the agent doing that in my life, that's my fucking job. I will continue to use dumb agents that I direct, because only I retain ownership and sole rights to my personal context on which my decisions are based.
And they’re not em-dashes -- they’re double hyphens.
But perhaps the best approach would have been to down-vote and move on.
Also, not a single provider can pull the rug if I'd like to use a particular model.
It's trivial to rent all of the above components in a competitive market under different periods, you may simply rent the token output from someone who put in the effort on this as well.
An open frontier model induces margin compression on training and inference prices across the industry.
There's something to be said for making these technologies equitable to those with less resources, but that's due to the cost of hardware and the nature of how transformer models scale... not really anything to do with "open"ness.
Worst case you can still archive the weights and hope for capable hardware to get affordable. At the same time this archive is the base line for a new frontier lab to start over if required. I see open weights as a pure upside even though I can't run the bigger models in my home lab.
You don't need much capital up front, you can just rent servers to run it. It's going to be more expensive than openrouter though because you probably don't have economies of scale if you're the only customer.
I'm hoping that all software will be getting opensource clones on par with original software 5 months after the closed source software release.
> As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court -- even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.
This would only be true in a vacuum. Ignoring several leaps of progress where it would suddenly be allowed for an AI to represent one in court (imagine the size of the context window) and you could also call it from prison. That is not what is imbalanced about the US court system. Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.
It's also funny how the interest of "AI for everyone" only extends to the national interest but I guess he's got to make sure he stays in good graces with the current administration.
The bigger problem with his argument IMO is that even with open models, it's still the person or organisation with the most money / access to GPU compute winning. They run the larger model (or collection of models), they can process more tokens through them in the same amount of time etc
Radical times may need radically different approaches.
> Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools.
"access" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, yes everyone has access to the US healthcare system. Is it affordable for everyone? Not even close, but politicians will always phrase it that way as a non-agreement to proposals of universal healthcare.
Should any kind of "superintelligence" exist, it must be a public good, available to all. Not controlled by a small handful of oligarchs and profit seeking entities.
> Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.
and where the money is going ? to the lawyers...
its the organisational goal of that endeavour
they are doing it in a phase of firing people
so the goal of llm at meta is "to make people redundant" and no matter of HR/PR speak can change it
antrophic and openai have the goal "lets create the future"
whomever they hire and no matter how much money they spend on it, the goal alone will create very different outcomes.
I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.
Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”
I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.
Yet these companies are doing well by any standard. Sure, IBM is bad but it's still a $100B company.
Who is even doing useful projects at these companies? Every story I've heard is everyone is doing useless projects for promotions.
Maybe I just don't know how large companies work.
It's possible that a lot of people get laid off because of AI, but it's also possible that Javin's paradox kicks in and employment goes up. Nobody knows yet, but I hope for the positive outcome.
earning money is an effect of running a company, not a goal.
its like saying the goal of an olympic swimmer is to stay afloat. no, staying afloat is a prerequisite of winning. not a goal in itself.
Non profits.
Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.
They all do it for the same reason: to make a lot of money by selling it to companies who want to cut labor costs.
Pushes for export controls on China who have released open weights on much more powerful models than Meta (and I believe that trend's not changing any time soon). I guess open models are bad if they're communist.
The entire essay has not one mention of the Metaverse, that little thing they spent $80b on and rebranded the whole company around.
As usual, the only centralised power Zuck hates is one that isn't in his own hands.
“I do not believe restricting access to foreign open source models is an effective solution.”
https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/
Another example Zuckerberg gives is an LLM analyzing his sleep patterns. Do you need an AI to tell you if you're fucking exhausted every day? Is that analysis somehow going to give you more time to sleep?
It's a technocratic fairy tale founded on the idea that modern problems are driven by a lack of personal analysis rather than external pressures that are often systemic and out of our control. So far, LLMs have made a lot of those systemic issues worse: concentrating more wealth in a smaller number of people's hands, increasing consumer electricity and electronic prices, etc.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-parenting-debate-sam-altm...
I think you have to pick your battles here. Is this weirdo optimised-human future going to happen? Maybe, maybe not. I hope not. But if it does I'd rather it happened with compute in my house, and I don't even have kids to worry about.
Call it whatever you want. I think it's a sign of resignation, to some extent.
"Hey we're doing AI but we're not doing AI" and blah blah ethics.
I'm sure meta will save the world with their ads.
"One machine for every man, woman and children of Zion. Sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me." Morpheus
It's a joke. OR IS IT? Yes it is, don't worry about it.
Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.
Maybe it gets 10 car insurance quotes for you based on 4 models of car you’re considering.
Or figures out which psychologists in some travel distance of you actually take your insurance, are taking new patients, and what availability they have.
I can think of a ton of scenarios where a capable and reliable AI agent could make my life simpler.
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
Don't worry about the scriptures though. It's likely to be just some old thinker pointing out the dangers of technologies of his time. No reason to believe those dangers carry over to today's technologies, probably.
1 Kings 18:36-40
36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
38 Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.
39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”
40 Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
1 Samuel 18:25-27
25 Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27 David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.
Please go self-flagellate in front of the nearest investment bank/retirement fund's offices to make your penance.
And they can't win because nobody smart wants to work there for long
What personal vision did Zuckerberg ever get right?
The Future Is for Everyone – The Path to a Positive AI Future
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49241728
Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49241679
More seriously, I am glad if this has become a battleground again. Not least because the only way out of the bubble economy is to at least try to deflate it before it explodes.
A little animation of the idea that open weights can be an American competition might also fend off the idea that the government should be the bag holder for OpenAI and Anthropic, and prevent them aligning with the administration's current '50s nostalgia FUD about communists.
well minus driving teenagers to suicide by helping advertisers target girls with poor body image issues, helping launch psyops campaigns to destroy democracy, helping fascist regimes murder their citizens for wrong think, etc.
Hard pass.
Murderer shouts "killing bad".
I honestly feel sad for him.
Remember the wind surfing photo? This guy is so weird probably since birth. Called a lizard person routinely. There is no cure possibly. Unless the AI can invent it.
Having money and financial success is one thing but the money simply can't buy you a normal human brain.
If you are a reptile once, you are a reptile forever.
Ollama has been abandoned since 2023.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-07/meta-order...