> That they even bothered to do all that stuff is good. That others don’t is bad

good and bad isn't what Meta and AWS is running with. If AWS trains willy nilly on user data like Meta does, AWS is toast. AWS is already taking a huge risk by now using their own take of AWS FDEs competing against their established ecosystem of consulting companies that used to recommend all 583 of AWS products to host a static webpage. Turning of more customers by training on their data is too much of a risk. That's the "good" - a risk analysis.

Meta doesn't care if you stop using Facebook, Whatsapp etc. Frankly, if you are embedded in the Facebook, Whatsapp ecosystem, you don't have a way out as a normie. Even if you are technically capable, good luck publishing your custom Mattermost build for iOS.

Meta has a significant amount of investment in hardware, originally due to Metaverse. The way to monetize that investment is inference and training. That's a do or die decision for Meta. Meta isn't releasing open-weight models because they are "good".

Meta is releasing open-weight models for the same reason Alibaba, NVIDIA or IBM does. Or Google releases Gemma.

There's no "good" or "bad" - the moment Alibaba, NVIDIA, IBM or Google's objective functions change, "Do no evil" will quickly morph into "Do as much evil as necessary without the costs of getting caught exceeding E(outcome)"