Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models (ft.com)
521 points by root-parent 21 hours ago
bushido 15 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 15 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.
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.
kamranjon 15 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.
Topfi 11 hours ago
curious_cat_163 10 hours ago
Thanks!
When is Gemma5 coming out? :-)
AnonymousPlanet 5 hours ago
And yet it's not called eleuther.cpp or bert.cpp. And the famous subreddit isn't called r/localbert but r/locallama.
optimalsolver 2 hours ago
Hey, with the changes at Deepmind, is the Gemma project still ongoing?
elliotec an hour ago
avadodin an hour ago
tjwebbnorfolk 10 hours ago
where's gemma 124b-a15?
teaearlgraycold 6 hours ago
axegon_ 15 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 13 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.
wnc3141 7 hours ago
Forgeties79 13 hours ago
JoshTriplett 11 hours ago
> The reason why llama is open source
Llama has never been open source. It's source-available, but still proprietary, under terms that (among other things) say "no competing with us, you have to buy a license for that".
maffulli 39 minutes ago
ekianjo 10 hours ago
tehlike 15 hours ago
Why do you think they continued to do it?
Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
bastawhiz 14 hours ago
axegon_ 14 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime 14 hours ago
cma 15 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.
sarjann 31 minutes ago
Fundamentally I always try to look at incentives. It's not that they are good or bad but that incentives favour certain behaviours.
Google is incentivised to collect a bunch of data (like FB) to improve their ad serving etc. Apple does not have that incentive as they don't make as much off advertising as hardware / app revenue.
NVIDIA is friendly with open source as they want to commoditise the model layer and take the gains in the hardware / data center layer.
I am trying to think what the incentive is here.
s0ss 15 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 12 hours 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.
maleldil 8 hours ago
JoshTriplett 11 hours ago
Also, llama isn't even open source; it's proprietary, with the source available.
semiquaver 15 hours ago
Words mean what people use them to mean. Ship has sailed whether you approve or not.
s0ss 14 hours ago
JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago
xandrius 15 hours ago
Enough good? You are joking, right?
They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
dozerly 15 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 13 hours ago
SoftTalker 15 hours ago
Competely agree. React and whatever else they've open sourced is inconsequential compared to the harm they've caused.
ben_w 14 hours ago
larodi 3 hours ago
Ha-ha they released nothing. It got leaked and without the source for it. Totally wrong to portray them as benevolent benefactors to the ML race
segmondy 10 hours ago
It was leaked which put it in the open, it got widely popular and they rode the wave. I'm not so such if they would have widely released it if it wasn't leak. Nevertheless mucho credits to them for following up with llama2, llama3, llama4 and now muse.
sellmesoap 13 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.
nylonstrung 3 hours ago
> React is an industry goto
Tbh React might be as unforgivable as the Myanmar genocide
maffulli 38 minutes ago
Except that Llama's license has restrictions that make it incompatible with the Open Source Definition. https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not... I haven't checked the license of the new models, yet.
claaams 2 hours ago
I think this is categorically false. And furthermore comments like this are being used to astroturf and protect reputations of no-good companies and AI slop to keep the bubble growing. Embarrassingly, Mark Zuckerberg spent 80 billion dollars creating Miis for the oculus. The guy also comes off as extremely miserable and delusional in such a unique way that it's possible that there's no real psychological language to describe what is happening to him because his situation is so rare.
sicktriple 8 hours ago
Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests.
When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.
dpc050505 5 hours ago
When the material conditions and the people at the top of all of the corporate world lead to decisions with awful ethical implications there's conclusions that should be reached.
thayne 4 hours ago
Would you say it is a fallacy to apply such value judgements to say, the institutions of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), the KKK, the KGB, etc? How about a company whose business was selling slaves?
To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.
ronbenton 12 hours ago
Meta is extremely net evil though
GlacierFox 44 minutes ago
It's easy to appear to have good intentions when you're railing against the companies that have decimated your output and made you [Meta] almost irrelevant in the AI 'race'.
trolleski an hour ago
I mean... I'm sure SS had wives and kids. It doesn't mean we should focus on that while analyzing their impact on the world.
sterlind 14 hours ago
llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.
gmerc 4 hours ago
Nobody learned nothing from the metaverse.
kazinator 6 hours ago
Gaddafi criticized Islamic fanatics; he was basically a good guy in the Middle East.
amelius 15 hours ago
I think it's a case of "commoditize your completement" ...
kdavis 3 hours ago
I know I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but the sentence...
"Meta did...kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023"
ignores the majority of open source software history[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
GaryBluto 3 hours ago
I imagine he was referring to the open source LLM model race considering the subject of discussion.
johnnienaked 3 hours ago
Net good for Meta, they hope
BiteCode_dev 3 hours ago
I read this comment in a same way I read "Microsoft in not that bad" comments in 2020.
This is why bad people keep inheriting the earth. We keep forgiving them and they keep doing their crap.
johnbarron 15 hours ago
>> No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil.
I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
ben_w 14 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".
insane_dreamer 9 hours ago
Thiel might belong there, and Altman
johnbarron 14 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.
echelon 15 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.
thepasch 10 hours ago
This seems provably untrue? GLM and Kimi have been at the top of the open weights conversation for a while, and K3 and GLM-5.2 were still released in full; K3 added a commercial clause to the license, but is otherwise still completely open for personal use. And K3 in particular isn't just at the open frontier anymore, but trading blows with the frontier frontier.
codedokode 13 hours ago
So you are complaining that there are too many open weight models and you would like less of them?
gfody 11 hours ago
personally I'd love to see open base models, and let companies differentiate with premium access to post training and alignment - that's where the real fight is anyways. they really ought to be pooling their resources/data and getting more economical with the pre-train anyways.
doublerabbit 15 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?
latexr 3 hours ago
> I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good
“Enough” for what? Surely not enough to offset all the bad they’ve inflicted and allowed on the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
> I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
Zuckerberg has shown through repeated action that he does not deserve any benefit of the doubt. This is the guy who called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him.
This is not even a case of “fool me once” anymore. If you continue to believe Zuckerberg, you’ve been fooled dozens, hundreds of times, and shame is definitely on you.
trolleski 15 hours ago
???
blueSky1989 19 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 16 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 13 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"
ignoramous 11 hours ago
Rapzid 14 hours ago
Right, yeah.. That's the subtext right?
Melatonic 17 hours ago
Broken clock is right twice a day.
And in this case I think is quite correct
larodi 3 hours ago
Am I the only one getting the impression this dude was merely lucky back in the day, in fact at the right time, rather than having been super intelligent nor forward thinking… ?
I mean - given all his throw outs in media and his apparent burn of nearly 80bn for a failed 3D world?
subarctic 2 hours ago
I mean, of course it was a matter of being at the right place and right time, and being able to execute. He definitely was lucky but that alone isn't enough
chinathrow an hour ago
paxys 19 hours ago
Now go read Zuck’s comments on AI when he fired 8000 employees earlier this year.
frenchtoast8 19 hours ago
Any particular quote you want to share?
paxys 19 hours ago
misiti3780 19 hours ago
did he fire 8000 people because of AI, or because he over hired in ZIRP like everyone else?
bogzz 16 hours ago
moffkalast 15 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.
ViktorRay 20 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 20 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 15 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 13 hours ago
24t 15 hours ago
cataphract 19 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 16 hours ago
mrDmrTmrJ 16 hours ago
danielrhodes 16 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.
jamesrr39 15 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 16 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.
lukeschlather 11 hours ago
The "commoditize his closed rivals" line of reasoning doesn't make sense to me. That doesn't sound like a business decision, it sounds potentially spiteful? But that's ascribing malice to what could just as easily be explained by good faith.
Meta doesn't really offer any profit-making AI product, so I don't understand what commoditizing it buys them in this narrative. You could argue they rely on AI and so want it to be a cheap commodity - but that is not harming their rivals, that is just a different way of stating that Meta is engaging in something that enables people to collectively work for mutual benefit, which is not a nefarious plot against rivals, it is laudable cooperative behavior.
blablablerg 5 hours ago
pjmlp 16 hours ago
If only folks did the same in regards to React adoption....
razster 12 hours 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.
starkshift 7 hours ago
The essential principle of free market economics is that good things may be done for selfish reasons and that this in itself is actually good
waffletower 18 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 15 hours ago
jmalicki 16 hours ago
bigfishrunning 16 hours ago
godelski 16 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 15 hours ago
dudefeliciano 15 hours ago
strtok 12 hours ago
Unless weights are being manipulated to make the model respond in a way that favors the owners.
alex1138 16 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
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)
mcbuilder 15 hours ago
Yeah, I feel like we bigly lose to China if we don't.
A_D_E_P_T 20 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 20 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 19 hours ago
diegolas 19 hours ago
GetMeSoon 19 hours ago
beagle3 18 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 12 hours 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 19 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 18 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 15 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 14 hours ago
stale2002 10 hours ago
popalchemist 16 hours ago
Preventing one apocalypse is good but it doesn't absolve another.
cush 15 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 15 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 14 hours ago
sscaryterry 15 hours ago
bevr1337 15 hours ago
dwaltrip 13 hours ago
nozzlegear 19 hours ago
Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.
http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...
Opocio 2 hours ago
Not if you are worried about the existential threat AI poses. Having easily available AI makes it hardier to regulate, control and limit until we find a way to align AI. Harder to control is a good thing for most technologies, but not for all. A weak analogy is nuclear weapons. if Meta would release and open source some tech that would magically make extremely easy and cheap for everyone to build a nuke, it would not be a positive for society.
lrvick 15 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.
nylonstrung 3 hours ago
I think it's positive and at the very least it's a force countervailing the push to legislate or ban open models in the US
If they were able to make a leading closed model would they be doing it though? It seems like they read the room and saw that this is the only way they can have relevance within LLMs
runjake 16 hours ago
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.
alex1138 5 hours ago
Zuck's DNA is clear. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4
baggachipz 19 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.
asveikau 10 hours ago
If you've seen Zuckerberg for long enough you'll see he doesn't hold any position for all that long. Remember they renamed the entire company for a product idea he basically abandoned. So if he does "the right thing" you can just wait, he'll give up on it pretty soon.
drTobiasFunke 12 hours 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.
ElProlactin 16 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?
etempleton 12 hours ago
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.
scoofy 15 hours ago
We support an open model ecosystem (because we failed to produce a successful closed model).
conception 20 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.
a2ff6eeb0 16 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 16 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 14 hours ago
a2ff6eeb0 16 hours ago
alfalfasprout 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 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 16 hours ago
As they say, even Hitler built the autobahn.
sanderjd 15 hours ago
I don't know about "unquestionably", but yes, I think this is a better path than the proprietary models.
s0ss 15 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 14 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 14 hours ago
giancarlostoro 11 hours ago
I'll always opt for giving companies / people praise for doing the right thing regardless of how infrequently they do so. I hope Mark Zuckerberg keeps open sourcing models.
jstummbillig 16 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 15 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 15 hours ago
ben_w 14 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.
sojournerc 15 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
mitthrowaway2 19 hours ago
It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.
paxys 19 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.
eddielement 19 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 13 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."
troupo 7 hours ago
The company that pirated books [1], and is unconditionally opting in all their users into training their AI [2] is releasing "open" models. Awwwww.
[1] 82 TB of books https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
[2] Here's a simple 12-step manusl process to opt-out on Facebook https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html
mikeweiss 16 hours ago
I thought open model != open source?
CharlesW 16 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_ 13 hours ago
Yizahi 20 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 19 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.
madrox 12 hours ago
It is dangerous to admire or despise anyone for who they are; it's ok to say someone did something good or bad.
jmyeet 15 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 15 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 15 hours ago
popalchemist 16 hours ago
It's the who, not the what.
j45 19 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 19 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 16 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
reducesuffering 16 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?
This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
aeve890 16 hours ago
>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 15 hours ago
esafak 15 hours ago
dismalaf 16 hours ago
> 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 15 hours ago
nkrisc 15 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 19 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 15 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.)
dbspin 20 minutes ago
tancop 18 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 18 hours ago
bigyabai 19 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.
dbspin 18 minutes ago
Micrococonut 19 hours ago
Sounds good. We can stop conducting business online and get back to being humans.
dspillett 2 hours ago
Is this like when they declared E2EE was the future and those not doing it were behind, but as it turned out bad for the bottom line¹² such features are getting rolled out of their properties?
U-turn when meta finds an inconvenience due to open weights in 3… 2… … …
--------
[1] reduced advertising revenues due to not being able to target based on message traffic, and reduced data scraped for training purposes
[2] and possibly in part due to behind-the-scenes pushback from government/police/other interests
forestrywat 21 hours ago
Is this "I'm losing so I think we should change the rules"? Because it seems like that.
drob518 20 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 15 hours ago
Yes, but it's good for everyone that the strategy of attempting to commoditize the cash cow of a competitor exists.
overfeed 16 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 16 hours ago
thraway3837 14 hours ago
basch 19 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 17 hours ago
germandiago 10 hours ago
Competition is good.
thraway3837 14 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.
sodapopcan 20 hours ago
Similar to Altman saying "we should slow down."
amarcheschi 20 hours ago
or musk a few years ago, pause ai training for 6 months (so we can catch up)
scotty79 20 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 18 hours ago
sodapopcan 20 hours ago
andy99 14 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.
some_random 11 hours ago
It's the same game that's been played since the invention of commerce.
wombat-man 16 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 16 hours ago
meta playing spoiler, yeah. fun stuff!
HDThoreaun 18 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 20 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.
RunSet 20 hours ago
"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
\- Mark Zuckerberg[0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
basch 19 hours ago
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 18 hours ago
alex1138 16 hours ago
Yizahi 20 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.
mvkel 7 hours ago
They launched their model a week ago, completely closed, selling an endpoint. Then when nobody bought, they "open" sourced it. Ok.
root-parent 20 hours ago
Is going to take it one day at a time, on being a less evil bilionaire :-)
"Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help stranded boat" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/09/zuckerberg-s...
limagnolia 20 hours ago
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 12 hours 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.
darkwizard42 6 hours ago
detourdog 20 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.
limagnolia 20 hours ago
hadlock 17 hours ago
gorgoiler 13 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 13 hours ago
Click through rate is what drives the headline.
rufasterisco 9 hours ago
The article clearly states he was not on board.
There are many reasons for critizing him over things he is responsible for.
Never been a fan of mob lynching.
greyw 15 hours ago
There are many many more things wrong with Zuckerberg than wasting my (our?) attention on ragebait nothingburgers like these.
shevy-java 15 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.
cmiles8 14 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 14 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 14 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.
solenoid0937 7 hours ago
redox99 12 hours ago
aabhay 11 hours ago
The relevant paragraph about Meta’s commitment to open source is here, and the statement is significantly less confident than news is reporting
> • Open source is a positive and important force for empowering people and preventing centralization that is detrimental for both safety and the economy. Meta continues to be strongly supportive of open source, including open source AI models. The current open source ecosystem is strong, and we think it would be a mistake to restrict it. Now that Meta Superintelligence Labs are up and running, we will resume releasing some open source models soon.
“We will resume releasing some open source models soon”??? That’s basically the most ambiguous non commitment ever. Even before legal team watering it down I can’t imagine what the intent is here. We are also going to release open models for things maybe or maybe not kinda? Absolutely zero conviction. And moreover, this explicitly frames the open source ecosystem as something Meta is not a part of.
jefftk 11 hours ago
> “We will resume releasing some open source models soon”??? That’s basically the most ambiguous non commitment ever.
I mean, they released another one today: https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-...
imPndy 16 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?
rufasterisco 21 hours ago
The essay from Zuckerberg
riazrizvi 18 hours ago
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.
rufasterisco 9 hours ago
I don’t understand. The model is open, you can host it and use it without giving Meta anything.
I’m not saying Meta is not eager to syphon data from users, but I don’t see how this happens via this specific product.
sammyteee 21 hours ago
God, it's a bit War and Peace...
ipsum2 19 hours ago
Non-archived version: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/ since its not paywalled.
antonmks 20 hours ago
So many em dashes...
wolttam 20 hours ago
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 20 hours ago
moomin 20 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 20 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.
solenoid0937 7 hours ago
Sure but that's true with the closed models as well. They run on different providers and you can choose the cloud provider you prefer.
lumost 20 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 20 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.
A_D_E_P_T 20 hours ago
Deepseek V4 Flash works on consumer-grade hardware, and it's extremely good.
rft 20 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.
kube-system 15 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.
gorgoiler 13 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?
logicchains 20 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 20 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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 8 hours ago
10 Aug 2026 14:49:05 UTC | Mark Zuckerberg Lays Out New AI Vision in 6,500-Word Essay | https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mark-zuckerberg-lays-out-new-ai-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49244449
10 Aug 2026 17:15:20 UTC | Zuckerberg Posts 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence | https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-posts-deranged-6-500... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246721
10 Aug 2026 18:18:20 UTC | Zuckerberg makes a case for unleashing Pandora's box | https://www.theverge.com/tech/977395/meta-mark-zuckerberg-su... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247557
twright 15 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 15 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 15 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 15 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 15 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 15 hours ago
thewebguyd 15 hours ago
rufasterisco 9 hours ago
AI is having an impact on the legal system already.
vovavili 15 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 15 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...
edukite 7 hours ago
Only in a world were AI companies can subsidize AI usage indefinitely. In reality AI is not cheap and larger & more potent model it's usage costs is more expensive
nadermx 15 hours ago
or in this case, to the AI company who runs the lawyer.
nerevarthelame 15 hours ago
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.
dofm 15 hours ago
This is alas not only his imagining, is it:
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.
mhviraf 7 hours ago
Not a Meta fan per say but their contribution to open source has always been great. Examples include PyTorch (has had huge impact on velocity of ML research), Llama models, segment anything, many notable research papers from FAIR, etc. I never thought I would say this but I’m with Zuck on this. The call for slowing down AI development for safety seems like an excuse for reducing opex for training better models to stay relevant.
darepublic 10 hours ago
It's ironic Zuckerberg would criticize anyone for closing stuff up. Facebook being the classic walled garden. That said the enemy of my enemy etc.
macwhisperer an hour ago
I feel like all the ppl complaining itt don't even run open weight models.. wahh billionaire bad is true, but you are missing the forrest for the trees.. they are literally bending the knee and ur mad about it? it literally means local models won.
franze 20 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 19 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 16 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 18 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 17 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 14 hours ago
toyg 19 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.
jillesvangurp 3 hours ago
Meta's problem is not models but doing something productive with them. Meta never really nailed that. Just like Google is struggling with this. And MS. It's the classic disruptors dilemma. In order to embrace the new thing, they have to let go of the old thing that has made them rich.
If you look beyond the somewhat tone deaf leadership, the somewhat stale business model of social media, etc. Meta doesn't actually have a whole lot to bring to the table. They probably managed to hire/keep some AI talent with the help of large salaries. But they are knee deep into having made big figure commitments to data center capacity with nothing to show for it yet. Their AI effort is increasingly looking like a repeat of their failed metaverse strategy. A lot of expensive bets that are not paying off.
It all boils down to Mark Zuckerberg not being the visionary and innovator he thinks he is. Like many billionaires he confuses him lucking out in his twenties with some magical leadership qualities or brain capacity he has. And the reality of course is that he lucked into building a nice social networking thingy not hindered by too much technical skill or deep scientific knowledge. Granted, he did that well. But that's 20 years ago. And then he added to that with some strategic acquisitions of stuff that others did (Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) that you might label as spectacularly good acquisitions for Meta.
But he's not going to reinvent AI. He's way out of his depth there. A bit of a technical lightweight without much academic credentials or much of a vision. His "vision" here is copying what the Chinese and others are already doing well. What's lacking is a vision as to how his version of that is going to be any better and win over all those users. Or indeed a vision as to what people are going to do with all this AI. Apparently there is no vision for that in the context of Meta's own products. This is a company going through the motions of being an AI company without any vision whatsoever as to why they are doing that other than a fear of missing out.
root-parent 21 hours ago
BrenBarn 5 hours ago
What a load of insincere hogwash. If Zuck wanted to dilute the power of large institutions he has several billion ways to do it other than making limp gestures in the direction of open source. The problem is that even if you take him at his word here, he's only willing to do more good and not less harm.
ungovernableCat 15 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 13 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 12 hours 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."
brokegrammer 8 hours ago
Attack anything you can't compete against
Zigurd 19 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 19 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.
analog31 11 hours ago
Great, we can use open or closed models, now that the money is in running the models through their data centers either way.
Havoc 10 hours ago
He released a good open weights model. On that basis he gets to take a few potshots…
mtoner23 15 hours ago
Why would someone good at running a social media website be good at managing and developing ai frontier models
chrisra 15 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.
gaigalas 20 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 20 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 20 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 12 hours ago
detourdog 20 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 20 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 20 hours ago
The "nested reality" twist was already used by the "13th floor" movie so perhaps they intentionally choose a different direction.
staticman2 10 hours ago
I think Matrix 3 would have been better if it was more about humans taking control of the Matrix and trying to figure out what a virtual utopia looks like.
ben_w an hour ago
gaigalas 20 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.
root-parent 20 hours ago
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
gaigalas 20 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 16 hours ago
lenerdenator 19 hours ago
mekpro 10 hours ago
why so much hate on this ? Meta releases open Model and it is competitive and confirms the direction, what could we ask more !!
fsuts 20 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
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-07/meta-order...
asa123 20 hours ago
new mexico == mexico
hk__2 20 hours ago
I’m surprised Trump hasn’t proposed to rename Mexico "Old Mexico".
mattsears 12 hours 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.
gdiamos 16 hours ago
How big is the open model? 30B?
karim79 12 hours 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.
krater23 9 hours ago
Is today Opposite Day? Or April 1th?
Razengan 15 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 15 hours ago
This is what losing looks like.
lvl155 16 hours ago
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.
andrewstuart 16 hours ago
>> promoting his vision of “personal superintelligence”
What personal vision did Zuckerberg ever get right?
MuseSpark 15 hours ago
Glad to see us in HN
ChrisArchitect 19 hours ago
Discussion on sources:
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
KPGv2 15 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.
shevy-java 16 hours ago
These AI companies owe us money.
dofm 15 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.
balls187 15 hours ago
Isn't this the pervert trying to record me in when I am changing in the locker room?
Hard pass.
sleepybrett 16 hours ago
don't care, he left a woman and a child to die at sea.
juleiie 16 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.
bewareofscams 20 hours ago
Thief shouts "stealing bad".
Murderer shouts "killing bad".
customguy 20 hours ago
And the cops just shake them a bit, waiting for the case to fall out naturally.
VCFundedGenYer 18 hours ago
Talk is cheap. Do it.
Ollama has been abandoned since 2023.
gamblor956 17 hours ago
Ollama was updated within the past month?
bhewes 16 hours ago
Hahaha calling Zuckerberg a negative externality on the world is hilarious you guys are too much.