> Here we go, predictably pulling the oldest trick in the book, just two weeks after it was reported [1] that the Superintelligence leadership was discussing moving to closed source for their best models, not for any risk mitigation reason, but for competitive reasons.
That's not pulling a trick, that's doing precisely what Zuck said he would do. In April 2024 Zuck on Dwarkesh said that models are a commodity right now, but if models became the biggest differentiator, that Meta would stop open sourcing them.
At the time he also said that the Model itself was probably not the most valuable part of an ultimate future product, but he was open to changing his mind on that too.
You can whine about that anyway, but he's not tricking anyone. He has always been frank about this!
> Meta is committed to open source AI. I’ll outline why I believe open source is the best development stack for you, why open sourcing Llama is good for Meta, and why open source AI is good for the world and therefore a platform that will be around for the long term.
> We need to control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor.
> We need to protect our data.
> We want to invest in the ecosystem that’s going to be the standard for the long term.
> There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives.
> I think it will be better to live in a world where AI is widely deployed so that larger actors can check the power of smaller bad actors [...] As long as everyone has access to similar generations of models – which open source promotes – then governments and institutions with more compute resources will be able to check bad actors with less compute.
> The bottom line is that open source AI represents the world’s best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone.
> I hope you’ll join us on this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world.
> Mark Zuckerberg
Pulling the "Closed source for safety" card, once it makes economic sense for you, after having clearly outlined why you think open source is safer, and how you are "committed" to it "for the long term" and for the "good for the world", is mainly where my criticism is coming from. If he was upfront in the new blog post about closing source for competitive reason, I would still find it a distasteful bait and switch but much less so than trying to just put the safety sticker on it after having (correctly) trashed others for doing so.
That's not pulling a trick, that's doing precisely what Zuck said he would do. In April 2024 Zuck on Dwarkesh said that models are a commodity right now, but if models became the biggest differentiator, that Meta would stop open sourcing them.
At the time he also said that the Model itself was probably not the most valuable part of an ultimate future product, but he was open to changing his mind on that too.
You can whine about that anyway, but he's not tricking anyone. He has always been frank about this!