Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized"

rkou

And what about the future of social media?

This is such devious, but increasingly obvious, narrative crafting by a commercial entity that has proven itself adversarial to an open and decentralized internet / ideas and knowledge economy.

The argument goes as follows:

- The future of AI is open source and decentralized

- We want to win the future of AI instead, become a central leader and player in the collective open-source community (a corporate entity with personhood for which Mark is the human mask/spokesperson)

- So let's call our open-weight models open-source, and benefit from its imago, require all Llama developers to transfer any goodwill to us, and decentralize responsibility and liability, for when our 20 million dollar plus "AI jet engine" Waifu emulator causes harm.

Read the terms of use / contract for Meta AI products. If you deploy it, some producer finds the model spits out copyrighted content, knocks on Meta's door, Meta will point to you for the rest of the court case. If that's the future for AI, then it doesn't really matter whether China wins.

jsheard

Decentralized inferencing perhaps, but the training is very much centralized around Metas continued willingness to burn obscene amounts of money. The open source community simply can't afford to pick up the torch if Meta stops releasing free models.

monkeydust

Curious but is there a path where llm training or inference could be distributed across the BOINC network: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure...

Qshdg

Great, who gives me $500,000,000, Nvidia connections to actually get graphics cards and a legal team to protect against copyright lawsuits from the entities whose IP was stolen for training?

Then I can go ahead and train my open source model.

hyuuu

the view of the comments here seems to be quite negative for what meta is doing. Honest question, should they go to the route of openai and closed source + paid access instead? OpenAI or Claude seem to garner more positive views than llama open sourced.

abetusk

This is the modern form of embrace, extend and extinguish. "Embrace" open source, "extend" the definition to make it non open/libre and finally extinguish the competition by shoring up the drawbridge to the moat they've just built.

uptownfunk

It’s marketing to get the best researchers. The researchers want the meta pay and they want to hedge their careers to continue to publish. That’s the real game, it’s a war for talent. Everything else is just secondary effects.

lccerina

"The Future" in the meantime we will keep doing our stuff, building walled gardens of AI generated spam and slop, and claiming our AI models are open source when they are not. The faster Meta dies, the better it would be.

alecco

* pre-trained models

* does not apply to training data

dzonga

the reason - i'm a little bearish on AI is due to its cost. small companies won't innovate on models if they don't have billions to burn to train the models.

yet when you look back at history, things that were revolutionary, it was due to low cost of production. web, bicycles, cars, steam engine cars etc.

menacingly

Decentralized on centralized hardware?

jmyeet

Two things spring to mind:

1. Open source is for losers. I'm not calling anyone involved in open source a loser, to be clear. I have deep respect for anyone who volunteers their time for this. I'm saying that when companies push for open source it's because they're losing in the marketplace. Always. No companiy that is winning ever open sources more than a token amount for PR; and

2. Joel Spolsky's now 20+ year old letter [1]:

> Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.

Meta is clearly behind the curve on AI here so they're trying to commoditize it.

There is no moral high ground these companies are operating from. They're not using their vast wisdom to predict the future. They're trying to bring about the future the most helps them. Not just Meta. Every company does this.

It's why you'll never see Meta saying the future of social media is federation, open source and democratization.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

candiddevmike

Stop releasing your models under a non FOSS license.

nis0s

I like the idea of this! But is there any reason to be concerned about walled gardens in this case, like how Apple does with its iOS ecosystem? For example, what if access to model weights could be revoked.

There is a lot of interest in regulating open source AI, but many sources of criticism miss the point that open source AI helps democratize access to technologies. It worries me that Meta is proposing an open source and decentralized future because how does that serve their company? Or is there some hope of creating a captive audience? I hate to be a pessimist or cynic, but just wondering out loud, haha. I am happy to be proven wrong.

croes

Also Meta: The future is VR

pjkundert

The future of everything you depend on is open source and decentralized.

Because all indications are that the powers over you cannot abide your freedoms of association, communication and commerce.

So, if it’s something your family needs to survive - it has better be distributed and cryptographically secured against interference.

This includes interference in the training dataset of whatever AIs you use; this has become a potent influence on the formation of beliefs, and thus extremely valuable.

Refusing23

'AI is so expensive, we'd rather have it handled with communism!'

If that means it'll be free/cheaper... sure

stonethrowaway

I’ll link to my comment here from approx. 52 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41090142

This is chess pieces being moved around the board at the moment.

CatWChainsaw

Facebook promised to connect the world in a happy circle of friendship and instead causes election integrity controversies, bizarre conspiracy theories about pandemics and immigrants to go viral, and massive increases in teen suicide. Not sure why anyone would trust them with their promises of decentralized-AI and roses.

troupo

I've had as a comment to a comment, but I'll repost it at the top level:

They use "open source" to whitewash their image.

Now ask yourself a question: where does Meta's data come from? Perhaps from their users' data? And they opted everyone in by default. And made the opt-out process as cumbersome as possible: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html And now complain that the EU is preventing them from "collecting rich cultural context" or something https://x.com/nickclegg/status/1834594456689066225

pie420

IBM Social Media Head: "The Future of Social Media is OPEN SOURCE and DECENTRALIZED"

This must be a sign that Meta is not confident in their AI offerings.

exabrial

only when it's financially convenient for them...

mrkramer

Yea, I believe you Zuck, it's not like Facebook is closed centralized privacy breaking walled garden.