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.
I made no value judgment about it. I merely note that it’s a game. Meta is not being altruistic or doing anything for the “good” of humanity or whatever. To be clear, I like competition with companies releasing open weight models.
Yeah I didn't mean to imply I was contradicting you, I meant my comment to expand on your point with my own value judgement that this kind of competition is actually quite a good thing.
> ...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?
That could be a move towards regulatory capture. Enact standards that they (and OpenAI) largely control, block access to Chinese models in the US, and effectively prevent challengers from catching up.
At the same time they slow down the arms race, so they can back off on training Capex without losing their lead.
In some aspect, yes, or they fear they will. For instance, Anthropic may fear that Chinese models will become “better” because they won’t put as many guardrails up, so they want everyone to agree to the guardrails such that if a model comes out showing better scores than Fable they can say “But it’s a dangerous model that doesn’t conform to our Pacing agreement.”
Or, they may be worried about government regulation that would really hurt their ability to move fast, so they want to get ahead of it with some “regulatory body” that they control. The motion picture, TV and gaming industries did this with self-imposed rating systems. The comic book folks did it with the “Comics Code Authority” back in 1954.
The governing body is only the western allies. USA + AUS + EU. Or anyone else that may sign a deeply disturbing and restrictive treaty. It's to make sure that the global majority does not make a better model or have access to the same hardware. As is currently the case with embargoes on EUV machines going to China, etc.
Models are not a moat, and I think OpenAI/Anthropic know this. They know that their IPO is being weakened by the open models. Neither is hardware. We are not far from other countries catching up with silicon that matches or exceeds western capabilities, and it will be cheaper.
I think you’re spot on here. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning cash at a phenomenal rate (clearly unsustainable in the long run), but it isn’t clear what the exit ramp is for them. If they stop training and just focus on inference (which they claim is profitable), they immediately fall off the list of frontier models. I’m sure China also sees this and is using state subsidies to fund industry and challenging the West to keep up. This is similar to the way that Reagan outspent the USSR in the 1980s, only now the Chinese are funding it. That said, it’s also not clear what happens if the Chinese models “win” (is that bad?), particularly when all the models get so good as to meet the needs of most applications. Anyway, AI lies at this interesting intersection of both standard technology competition and geopolitical competition.
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.
I suspect its also because Facebook has the infrastructure to do this. One thing they have done from the start is quite good infrastructure without outsourcing to any of the big cloud providers. I cant imagine demand / bandwith / compute use is increasing much for Facebook itself so they probably have the money and time to dedicate to scaling up for AI research.
Thanks. Yea, I’m sure there are corp strategies at play here. Zuckerberg didn’t just roll out of bed and decide to do this one day. Ever since the Llama 4 fiasco, I’m sure they’ve been trying to restart everything, but for whatever reason they can’t seem to deliver something on the frontier. So, when you’re behind, play the “open” card and accuse your competitors of being bad people. I’ve been a part of running this same play multiple times at multiple companies over decades.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He would have to be using the social security numbers for some nefarious purpose for it to be exploitation.
He was merely commenting on the ridiculousness of their availability. If you don’t see that, you’re reading your bias and postconcieved notions into the situation.
Do you not realize that outside of that he said "If you need any info on people at Harvard just ask"? Or "I'm going to fuck them [the Winklevoss twins] in the ear"? Or when he was reported to hack Crimson (Harvard newspaper) reporters who were investigating him?
NO OTHER COMPANY HEADS DO THIS (the dumb fucks quote, not the other things). Why do people like you give him a pass? It's not about "context"
Zuckerberg has also continually subverted privacy on FB. I'm talking about things like photo tagging and post visibility, not just advertiser stuff
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.
