I think about this a lot, I believe part of this just boils down to the fact that he’s a founder. He’s a builder, and I think that yields some intrinsic drive towards creativity and disruption.

Even with “metaverse” being a laughingstock, they’re still aiming for something ambitious. Each new Quest generation makes me think there may be a chance they pull it off.

Now, do I think he’s a great person? No, not really. Do I agree with most of his decisions on how he treats his users? Hell no, and that’s not changing.

But if you compare him to somebody like Sundar at Google - a weasley MBA who was first and foremost a corporate ladder climber - the difference in ambition is night and day.

Sundar made it to the top already, his only vision now is to stay at the top, and that means pleasing Wall Street, everything else is secondary. There is no grand technical ambition with him, there never was.

This goes for pretty much all non-founder CEOs. You could say the same things about Tim Apple, Andy Jassey, and other henchmen in waiting who made it to the big chair.

I think it comes down to the fact that founders get where they are by having big ambitions and taking risks, the MBA to CEO path is just craven corporate knife fighting with other MBAs.

Regardless, I think this is 50% Zuckerberg changing, 50% the other big companies are mostly run by ladder climbers.

two things to keep in mind though:

1/ Yann Lecun probably is the one pushing for open source

2/ Mark isn't doing this for the greater good and for humanity. It helps his business because Llama is becoming a standard, and people are building / improving, which in turn helps Meta and Meta's business

They were basically forced into this by being so far behind that they'd need to rent OAI or Anthropic services to stay competitive, which at their scale would've probably cost them more than it takes to train llama and benefit from community research help.

At least that was the rationale behind the intentional leak of llama 1 back in the day according to some sources anyway.

Yeah and they’d also lose top AI talent as well.

I don't find him redeemed, but I do wonder what has been baked into the tuning of these models? What a way to generate influence!

Nice try Meta PR department /s

Does it still count if the purpose is to dillute OpenAI's market power and not to benefit the world?

But diluting OpenAi's (or any other company's, for that matter) market power does benefit the world.

Good point! That's worthy in itself for sure.

More generally I think he's decided he needs to own the platform to be able to grow.

Him swearing about about (presumably) Apple telling them they can't do stuff (because tough shit, you're their serf) was legit I think.

Is your accusatory statement falsifiable?

I hope I can believe an honest man, Zuck in this case. And that can be enough.

But it's more of a question of who do _I_ want to admire. An honest question also; maybe it doesn't matter why he's doing it, maybe just doing it is enough.

Or maybe it's worth understanding if this is about Meta beating OpenAI (so, ego-driven) or because Meta really cares for democratic AI and distribution of power (so, not ego-driven).

I think it's the former, so not admirable — for me.