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Comment by Doctor_Fegg | Hacker News Reader

Commoditise your complements: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Meta has a moat. That moat is the connected graph of users across its various properties, and the (monetisable) attention of those users. Making LLMs a commodity reduces the likelihood that OpenAI (or someone else) will build a unique, unreproduceable product that rivals Meta's properties for attention.

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You can also look at it as a "scorched earth" strategy.

If an adjacent business can profit, it can build a war-chest and invest that in attacking your niche.

So destroy the potential profitability of their sector by giving away a free alternative.

which might draw anti-trust attention (ala microsoft giving away IE for free).

Unless the existence of Llama somehow inhibits users from downloading and using other LLMs (a-la Microsoft preinstalling IE) then I don't see how any just society would implicate them. Even if Llama becomes a monopoly; what's the market abuse in making something free?

Using a monopolistic position in one market (i.e. cash flow) to make another market not profitable can be considered abusing one's position in the first market.

i.e. can be compared to a form of "dumping" (not quite what dumping is normally, but close enough I think0.

And the text of posts/conversations in Facebook groups, and the reactions to them, public and private, a dataset that no one has access to.

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