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jmyeet | on: Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models
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 | parent
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 | root | parent
To be clear, the saying is about how companies treat open source, not the intrinsic value of open source to end users (individuals or companies). I'm very much a fan. The point is that profit-seeking only push for open source when they're losing.