> it was never intended to create some vast ARR revenue stream or reframe the way people look at AI. If Meta wanted to exploit it for personal success then they had lots of opportunities to do so.

They release the base model as open source, everyone uses it. They make a paid version, no one uses it.

They make no money from the open source version, they get no social credit from it. Where is the benefit to having an open source model?

> Where is the benefit to having an open source model?

Research. Llama is and was a research project, intended for researchers. You could make this same critique of Microsoft's Phi model, Apple's OpenELM or OpenAI's OSS. None of them were intended to be kingkillers, all of them are experimental in nature.

You might not have followed the space at the time, but there was a real race to implement the transformer architecture with fewer overall parameters than GPT-2 and GPT-3. Llama was revolutionary for sticking the landing without being entirely lobotomized, the "benefit" was that the model was usable on a local machine. Contemporary projects like Flan-T5 and GPT-J/GPT-Neo were entirely displaced, Meta's AI mindshare went ballistic for a few months and probably propped up billions in exit liquidity for executives and former employees.