I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.
There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment.
https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases
https://github.com/google-research/bert
https://github.com/google-research/t5x
If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.
Understand why T5Gemma is no longer under Apache-2.0 and honestly, have not seen that much advantage when testing that vs T0 in my experiments either way, but still, there are good reasons why plain old T5 and its descendants are still popular, licensing being among them.
Gemma team also has very consistently interesting models, especially like DiffusionGemma. Ironic, as (beside 2.5 Pro), I have never warmed up to the Gemini series of models but rate Gemma models far higher than e.g. Qwen in direct competition. In any case, thanks to the teams behind these for making as much possible.
[0] As in proper consumer hardware, not a cluster of DGX Sparks or Mac Studios solely for experiments that sometimes are asserted as being consumer grade...
When is Gemma5 coming out? :-)
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.
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".
Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
It arguably didn't really get leaked, and they had the .edu req mainly for fair use education exemption when legality of models was much more uncertain.
Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
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.
"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...
I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
Even if he is openly courting a Bond villain image and talking up his "robot army".
Essential employees were fired before the government had even established that it could safely do without them, and then...
After brandishing the chainsaw of efficiency in public, in the most cowardly way, went and then invoked all legal protections from being deposed on DODGE actions, personally and not answering under oath about the key decisions in that dismantling.
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.
This is why bad people keep inheriting the earth. We keep forgiving them and they keep doing their crap.
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?
“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.