Is this a tactical leak, stemming from a "commoditize your complement" strategy? Open source as a strategic weapon, without having to explain board members/shareholders/whatever that you threw around money on training an open sourced model?
I would assume so. Meta’s ML/AI team is very strong, but they probably don’t have a comparable product offering to ChatGPT ready for public use. So instead, they bought themselves some time by letting the open source community run wild with a lesser model and eat into OpenAI’s moat.
I think Meta’s problems are largely similar to Google’s: they have very bad leadership, specifically Zuckerberg, and thus can’t leverage their existing talent to execute/compete. The whole Metaverse fiasco would seem to demonstrate he’s effectively a “mad king” at this point, and probably surrounded by a sycophantic c-suite. Having the best talent in the world (which they obviously do by how fast LLama was spit out) isn’t going to matter that much if its all serving at the behest of someone who has become deluded by their initial success and has no ability to course correct.
Those headsets are subsidized, do you really believe that level of hardware costs less than the unit price of 300 dollars? Meta is trying to gain market share via selling at a loss and perhaps making money through games or simply getting everyone inside the "metaverse" to then show them ads.
They would've sold exactly as many of those if they didn't jump full-speed into the Metaverse rabbit hole. Even the Quest 2 release predates that direction shift.
It's extremely common for a "leak" to actually be fully intentional, but the organization in question just wants plausible deniability to mitigate legal/political/popular blowback.
In order to preserve plausible deniability, the leak will look genuine in all aspects that are easy to simulate. "Someone else did it" is easy to simulate. A better gauge would be to see if anyone is caught and punished. If so, it was probably a real leak.
I think the key here is that, given the way that Meta distributed the model, a leak was inevitable. So while they may not have directly orchestrated a leak it must have been an intended result.
It's widely presumed within faang-type-of companies that anything an employee says or does can be interpreted as an official company statement, especially by the press. As a result, many of these companies offer, often mandatory, trainings that underscore the importance of speaking carefully in public, since one's words can end up on the front page of a popular newspaper.
Although I don't know how FB rolls internally, it seems more likely than not to me, that it was ack'd by someone higher up in the organization than line engineers or managers. Someone with a permission of speaking publicly for a given area of a company - doesn't need to be CEO, more like a VP/Director maybe.
I’ve actually beat the streisand effect before by not responding.
The crowd gets bored and my DMCA requests flurry out a month later and all evidence disappears, individuals that might notice dont have the crowd to amplify that they noticed.
You can call that “tacit consent” if you want. But streisand removes all leverage.
> Llama is proprietary, the license hasn’t changed.
.. assuming that the weights are copyrightable and that you agreed to license them from Meta (fill out the form). Weights lack at least two requirements to be eligible for copyright protection in the US and many other jurisdictions. For the US, the weights are likely to be considered public domain (unless new legislation is introduced) but we'll have to wait for the courts to know for sure.
(Cont.) If you are of the opinion that weights are copyrightable, I encourage you to show how weights satisfy the requirements of copyright - particularly those concerning originality and human authorship - rather than silently downvoting comments you don't like. At least that way would - hopefully - result in a discussion that is far more informative for all of us.
I should have been more careful with how I wrote my comment. I almost always get silently downvoted when I bring this point up for discussion so I was directing that "you" at those people in particular and not at you. Sorry for coming across as attacking you and thank you for caring about hn.
