Open models are a good thing. OpenAI was open until it became obvious that being open was not going to pay for training costs and wouldn't help them get a competitive edge. I'd bet that if Meta gets to a place where their model is in a similar position, they will also become more closed. But right now, Meta is open because that is what weakens and creates the most contrast with the other AI labs.

It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.

Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.

You can tell how intellectually honest someone is when someone they hate makes a good point. It's possible to dislike (or even hate) Zuckerberg and understand that he's making a good point for selfish motives, and still want that thing as well. Instead you see several comments here twisting themselves into pretzels trying to explain how ackshually open models are bad now.

I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because it helps everyone.

> he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle

To be fair Meta/Facebook does have quite a strong open source history; React (Native), PyTorch, Btrfs, zstd, etc. It didn't just start here with AI models.

Facebook used the same strategy to compete with Google Maps. The company became one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap, which everyone has benefited from downstream.

If only folks did the same in regards to React adoption....

  > it's not out of principle.

I'd certainly rather things be done out of principle, but depending on what question you're concerned with that might not matter. There's also a clear hierarchy, but motivations are distinct from effect. The inverse of this is that lots of harm has happened from people with the best of motivations. I'd wager most evil in the world is created by men who would see themselves as good.

With Zuckerberg I think it isn't too hard. Clearly this is a business move, not a moral one. The motivation is wrong, BUT the effect is good. I think more open source models is better for the world. Closed source is also a business move and limits innovation as well as prevents people from interrogating safety. But there's valid arguments on either end.

My point more is that we can be nuanced. We should be nuanced. The world isn't black and white. The people making these decisions are neither demons nor gods and shouldn't be treated as such. My biggest fear is that if we resort to criticizing no matter what then those in power will just learn to ignore us. If they can do no good and only do wrong then there's no reason for them to do good (besides morals, but let's not pretend that's enough, even if it should be)

Yeah, I feel like we bigly lose to China if we don't.

While Zuck's contributions are probably overwhelmingly more negative than positive, Meta initiated both pytorch and llama which have had profoundly positive effects on AI research. And I really am not a fan of python :D

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I can't get over his negative externalities

Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank

He's seen with suspicion and rightly so

Edit: and the fact his site doesn't work. Posts don't work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)

Sure you can doubt the motivation of the speaker, but remember the validity of the argument itself is orthogonal to the speaker’s identity.

"This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now."

Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.

But I can and do still welcome this move here.

At the same time they are strongly promoting the OS age laws.

One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)

The price of Kimi K3 is 'monopolistically' determined by contract with Moonshot. The weights are nominally on Hugging Face but can only be provided under contract with Moonshot, which specifies what the price can be. So it will be with the next Alibaba behemoth and, I would think, all others forever.

Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.

The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.

Somewhat agree, but Facebook and social media are really bad though, even leaving aside extreme cases like Myanmar genocide promotion.

I think Facebook would need to do a lot more to balance the scales.

It absolutely does not absolve them of sin. But let's give them credit where it is due. Open models are a really good thing. Hopefully I won't be lynched by a mob in 3 years for once saying this.

Preventing one apocalypse is good but it doesn't absolve another.

do you have a $100 mil worth of compute to train your own version of this?

I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.

The weights are open, the training data obviously isn't. But a key thing you can do with open models is fine tune them. So while they may not be SOTA at everything, they can become SOTA at your particular business use case.

> It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems.

Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things?

I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.

I can guarantee that he has almost zero interest in “karma points”. I worked for FB years ago and that is not how he sees the world or sets direction did the company.

Almost certainly this is part of some grandiose bet which could have a chance to pay off massively in the future (AGI or similar), or a way to prevent an expensive dependency.

Facebook hasn't had much success getting people to use their hosted AI, so they're making those models free instead, to kneecap other companies who are trying to get paying customers for their own hosted AI. This gets people to ask themselves things like: how many months of Claude Max it would take to pay for hardware to run Muse Glimmer (the Meta model in question) offline?

As they say, even Hitler built the autobahn.

Yes, and even calling them "open weights" is very generous considering the license restrictions. The Financial Times puts "open" in quotes for good reason.

Where does this supposed saying come from? All I hear is PostgreSQL is the database intelligent people use, Git or GTFO and I don't even know what a closed source programming language is. Apache and nginx, Linux, DNS infrastructure.

In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?

>We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems.

Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator.

It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.

> We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?

Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.

Spear phishing isn't a real problem. Competent organizations have already implemented sufficient defenses and controls, regardless of whether the attacker is a human or LLM. Idiots will continue getting scammed but that's nothing new. I expect that many small businesses and local governments will be essentially forced to outsource their IT infrastructure to large vendors that can maintain hardened systems appropriate to the escalating threat level.

(Nuclear waste isn't an actual problem either. For civilian powerplants the highly radioactive waste can generally be stored indefinitely at the reactor site.)

> A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.

what if we dont use centralized identity at all?

web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.

now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.

its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.

that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.

the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.

but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.

> the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.

These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.

Sounds good. We can stop conducting business online and get back to being humans.