> albeit intentionally

The model was "accidentally" released.

Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know.

Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same.

The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution.

In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc.

The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.