Facebook doing Great Stuff with Open Source AI

If you had asked me 2 years ago what I thought about Marc Zuckerberg and Facebook, it would have taken 30 minues before I'd be able to use a single word that wasn't a curse word. Facebook arguably destroyed the world with their social media platform, by playing people up against each other, and separating family members, all in the name of cheap attention generated to inflate advertisement revenue.

Historically Facebook has been the destroyer of everything that's good in this world

Then comes AI

After AI went mainstream with ChatGPT they've apparently changed. Some of the best tools and libraries we've got access to as developers are now being pushed by Meta. Examples are Faiss and now their latest LLama 405B AI model.

According to tests LLama 3.1 405B scores similarly to OpenAI's gpt-4o, and it's open source. That's a really, really big deal because it empowers small and independent software companies such as ours.

Training an AI model such as LLama costs millions of dollars in electricity. For small companies such as AINIRO it's simply beyond what we can reach for. However, with LLama being open source, companies such as ours can download the model and leverage it as we see fit. This empowers the world.

Open Source matters

I'm the by far most active contributor to GitHub in Cyprus, with some 15,000 commits over the last 5 years or something. This implies I'm 3 times as productive at GitHub as the developer who's on 2nd place on the same list. This list has 18,000 developers may I add. Saying I'm passionate about open source would be an understatement.

Our own platform Magic Cloud was started as an open source project. However, we couldn't justify continue its development as open source for financial reasons. Companies such as Facebook having billions of dollars of annual revenue can however.

For Facebook to release an open source AI model is a no-brainer. AI is not their primary business model, and by open sourcing their AI tools, they are disrupting the space. I'm sure Meta has strategically analysed its potential impact, and found it to be net positive due to its potential to disrupt the entire vertical, to such reduce risk for themselves and their existing cash cow.

Sometimes companies will open source tools, not because they love open source, but rather because they want to destroy a threat to their own abilities to earn money.

What reasons Meta has to open source LLama, I don't know - I doubt it's because Marc Zuckerberg is "such a nice guy" - However, in the end it doesn't matter. What matters is that small independent software companies such as AINIRO gets to leverage AI to an extent that has typically been beyond what we could expect.

For the world this is a net positive

I never thought the day would come when I said something positive about Marc Zuckerberg, and for all I know, he might go back to torturing kittens or something next week - However, today I want to say the following ...

Great Work! 😊