Clinical Associate Professor, DPI Faculty in Residence, Director - MS in Business Analytics +Illinois MakerLab
Why did Meta invest so much in Llama3(and previous versions) and open source it? Llama3 compares well with an earlier version of Gpt4 on some benchmarks and outperforms Gpt3.5 on many. A conversation on the bird app, pointed me to a good resource which might help explain why. HT to Niran Babalola for sharing this resource https://lnkd.in/gZucZUaV It is a good read, and here is my take on common perspectives on why they are doing this Since Meta makes money from advertising, and advertisers pay for people engaging/clicking on their ads --> Meta needs more people, or more engagement/clicks from the existing user base. People come to meta to fullfill social and informational needs. More content(from genAI tools) certainly helps, though the jury is out if platforms will get swamped with generic AI generated content. Its possible some of this multi media content that users generate might help with their foray into VR. Incidentally, they also just open sourced their OS for the headsets 🤔 By releasing a good enough model for free they are effectively 'commoditizing their complement'. A complement being some product or service which is usually consumed along with the main product or service and adds value. Hence, if a firm can drive the price of that complement to zero, it can increase consumption of its product/service. In this case, the complement would be commercial LLM's such as OpenAI, which are attracting user attention and being used for content generation. Similarly, one can compare this move to what Google did when open sourcing Android to counteract Apple's IOS platform. Another interesting perspective from Emad mustaqe of Stability AI fame, discusses the value in having the community build on Llama3 and improve it. By his estimates, Meta is using about 10% of its compute to train Llama models, and if the community improves the model by 10%, Meta got a good return on investment. Its not clear if the cost of 10% compute and 10% improvement in the models is equivalent, though meta is also using llama to power AI functionality across interfaces under the Meta.ai banner (https://lnkd.in/gUCM-Pg5) Finally, it could also help Meta attract more developers who see this openness as an attractive option. This openness also means that users/developers will innovate on top of the base models and release many more variants and Meta gets more visibility. It is has been six days since launch and there are over 3500 variants (as on date) based on the two models (two versions each) released. See for yourself at https://lnkd.in/gBVBBCR6
Mark Moran, PhD
7mo
Vishal, just a couple of thoughts I’d add. First, it seems that Meta lives in a reality where normal criteria for what we consider rational investing just don’t apply…it’s still very much a founder’s culture, so there need not be a reasonable explanation. That said, I’d also add the Open Source is a valid model when success is simply defeating a closed-source incumbent.
Clinical Associate Professor, DPI Faculty in Residence, Director - MS in Business Analytics +Illinois MakerLab
7momore proof of innovation - https://twitter.com/mattshumer_/status/1783531642344067159