Meta (iirc Zuck in some interview) has stated before that monetizing the models directly isn't part of their plan, they intend to profit from platforms that are built around them, e.g. targeting ads better by having a model look at people's messenger history. It's in their interest to have the community do free work to improve their architecture.

Mistral is monetizing them directly, they sell API access.

The PR impact is priceless.

Before Llama, Meta was defined in the short-term by dubious investment in "metaverse" and cryptocurrency nonsense.

Now they are an open AI champion.

I wonder if part of the calculation is that it may hurt the closed-source competition.

they are rolling them into the platform, they will obviously boost their ad sales