Meta Gets Ready to Rumble

…with Open Source AI

In a recent post titled “Facebook/Meta, the Fourth AI Kingpin”, I highlighted how Meta was uniquely positioned to benefit from encouraging the development of Open Source LLM AI Models like its LLaMA models released early this year: 

“Facebook/Meta META-0.23% has continued to play a different, but important role in Large Language Model (LLM) AI technologies, with the roll out of its quasi-open source LLaMA models in March being a key catalyst to open source initiatives over the last few weeks, and of course, the now infamous “Google (and OpenAI) have no Moat” leaked memo of a few weeks ago (A must read for GOOG+0.79%, MSFT-0.63% & AMZN+0.63% followers) . 

Facebook/Meta Founder/CEO Zuckerberg continues to use Open Source LLM AI initiatives to throw sand in the business model gears for prime competitors OpenAI/Microsoft and Google. Meta’s business models aren’t geared around Search, Prompt Queries or API cloud usage fees. They benefit from the content and services (and Ads off them), on top of the AI Tech Stack (more on this in later posts).“

Not surprisingly, The Information now reports that Founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg (aka ‘Zuck’) is now discussing with his team how to move faster on releasing bigger and better open source models, this time potentially with commercial use licenses. 

“Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his deputies want other companies to freely use and profit from new artificial intelligence software Meta is developing, a decision that could have big implications for other AI developers and businesses that are increasingly adopting it.

Meta is working on ways to make the next version of its open-source large-language model—technology that can power chatbots like ChatGPT—available for commercial use, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation and a person who was briefed about it. The move could prompt a feeding frenzy among AI developers eager for alternatives to proprietary software sold by rivals Google and OpenAI. It would also indirectly benefit Meta’s own AI development.”

Meta has been getting ready for these moves, importantly by securing the largest allocations of Nvidia’s NVDA 0.00%↑ top-end H100 GPUs in recent months. As OpenAI’s Sam Altman noted recently, GPUs remain the main gating item for the industry this year at least.

Also note that Meta’s actions to date have powerfully powered the Open Source LLM AI movement, as I further highlighted recently, in “Open Source LLM AI Snowball rolls on”. Specifically, 

“Notable this year has been the the roll out of its quasi-open source LLaMA models in March, which has been a key catalyst to open source initiatives since then.  Their impact was noted of course, in the now infamous “Google (and OpenAI) have no Moat” leaked memo of a few weeks ago, by a senior Google engineer, Luke Sernau. As he notes,

“Open source companies, plainly put, are lapping us. Things we consider “major open problems” are solved and in people’s hands today.”

Google in particular is aware of the open source challenges and rolling out LLM and Generative AI Search (aka SGE) and related services with speed across its properties. 

And as I highlighted earlier in “The Empire Shoves back”, the results already are more than good enough to stand up against OpenAI and Microsoft challenges with ChatGPT and Bing Chet respectively, in particular because of relative user reach:

“Longer term, it’s also important to remember that Google has over 90% of search market share worldwide (less than 3% for Bing) with over 9 billion searches a day. That’s a fair bit of tailwind for their Generative AI Search vs the new kids on the block. 

The Empire is shoving back. Softly for now, but it’s a Shove.”

So Google is moving from nudging to shoving, and Facebook/Meta is potentially going from throwing sand in the gears to pebbles and rocks.

In the immortal words of Boxing MC Michael Buffer, “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!”.