AI: Meta accelerating 'throwing sand in their gears'. RTZ #362

...Meta Zigs while LLM AI peers Zag

Back last May, I penned a piece on Facebook/Meta as ‘the fourth AI Kingpin’ after Microsoft/OpenAI, Google, and Amazon, with a differentiated open source AI strategy “that throws sand in their gears”. Specifically, I noted that under founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s laser focus, Meta, armed with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s coveted H100 AI GPU chips,

“Continues to use Open Source LLM AI initiatives to throw sand in the Cloud Data Center business model gears of Amazon AWS, MIcrosoft Azure, Google Cloud and others”.

Almost exactly a year later in these early days of the AI Tech Wave, that strategy has shifted into high gear. The Wall Street Journal explains in “Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give its Tech Away Free”:

“Mark Zuckerberg has an unusual plan for winning the artificial-intelligence race: giving away his company’s technology free.”

“Like many of its rivals, Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms META -0.28%decrease; red down pointing triangle is spending tens of billions of dollars on high-end computer chips, top-flight computer scientists and gigawatts of electricity to build the most powerful AI tools it can. Unlike any of those rivals, some of whom made AI announcements last week, Zuckerberg is giving away the fruit of that investment—Meta’s most advanced chatbots and the technology that drives them.”

“Behind the contrarian strategy is a bet that making Silicon Valley’s hottest new technology free will drive down competitors’ prices and spread Meta’s version of AI more broadly, giving Zuckerberg more control over the way people interact with machines in the future.”

“For the AI-giveaway strategy to work, Meta must get its billions of users to look to those free AI services in the same way they flocked to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It wagers that advertising can come later, as it did in the past. Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into ad dollars is well established, although early user responses to its AI services have been mixed".

I’ve already highlighted how Meta has really upped its LLM AI game a few weeks ago, with Llama 3 in various sizes from small to large. And how it’s already performing head to head with the best models from OpenAI, Google and others.

As the WSJ continued to note:
”If OpenAI is building ChatGPT for the early adopters of the world, Meta is building its Meta AI for the average Joe.”

Over three billion joes and janes across Meta’s global properties Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp with Meta AI.

Also of note is Meta’s upcoming large version of Llama 3, the 400 billion parameter model, which would be a powerful open source addition to the product arsenals of businesses large and small looking to leverage their own data, applications and services with greater cost and delivery efficiency than similar LLM models available via APIs from the proprietary companies.

So ‘sand in the gears’ by the dredger ahead by Meta. Both on the consumer and commercial side of AI applications being deployed in Box 6 of the AI Tech Wave chart above.

Meta is indeed zigging different direction than others in the LLM AI space.

Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)