Of all the tech companies, Meta is the most ruthless and shameless. You'd have to be a total fool to trust Zuck, especially Zuck who put billions into AR for not much return and now billions into AI to create lackluster lagging models.
Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.
Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not close enough to them to know.
I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking their products and leadership but liking their contributions. Same energy but more intense in both directions many years later.
It helps that I like React alright. I don't think it's particularly well designed or enjoyable to use, and I hate debugging React code, but it's manageable with good development practices. Same goes for JS/TS. Not great, not terrible.
Not saying I buy this theory. Just trying to explain what I think they were alluding to, as I had the impression you missed it and went in a different direction.
Bad/evil deeds define us 1000x more than positive ones and thats our lasting legacy and how we are/will be judged.
The point was to counter the statement that Meta is the most ruthless and shameless of all companies.
The most ruthless and shameless company would not give back a lot of useful free open source software for hobbyists and companies to use.
Remember when they were into swaying elections, giving extra data to Cambridge analytica? Here's more
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/12/business/facebooks-y...
Second, I would argue that it's strange how we are discounting the contribution of OpenAI and Anthropic, because being the first to show that something valuable is possible actually counts for quite a lot in my book. Competition and open-source copies are nice, but the value add attribution in ai labs feels really strange at times.
What Meta has given, so far, are decent copies, which mostly serve their own needs and are making it harder for the above companies (who actually have to generate revenue through AI efforts, because it's all they do) to exist. And that's fine and all, Meta can do what they want to the degree the law permits, but I have a hard time understanding them as the good guys in the AI space, unless I squint very heavily.
Llama is not Open Source. Don't buy Meta's marketing that's trying to dilute the term. Llama is only available under restrictive terms that favor Meta.
They are incredibly ruthless and shameless in my opinion.
He's very close to peak homo economicus. (EDIT: this next point is wrong, the oral history I heard referred to Winklevoss pops, not Zuckerberg, and I misremembered) Which makes sense, given his father is deep in actuarial services.
I would not trust someone simply because we both have significant personal assets.
Have you seen Oracle?
Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying, it stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated claims about them in a public forum, right?
Oracle is an enormous company. I'm in my 40s, and literally every non-startup I've worked for in my career has been an Oracle customer, across multiple product lines. They're a 48-year-old company with more than 150,000 employees.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here on Oracle or its licensing and auditing practices. I'm just responding to the wild claims about revenue from lawsuits or license violations. Oracle stock has been publicly-traded for nearly four decades, so there's plenty of data available from their earnings statements. If these claims were even remotely based in reality, it would be easy to cite a source.
Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.
Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.
Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.
No, that's not theft. It's a license violation.
Otherwise, I agree.
> If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine.
I don’t think you read that correctly. To use an analogy, it’s similar to Costco requiring me to pay again for every item in my cart because I forgot to ring up a carton of eggs when I went through self-checkout. Maybe you don’t call that “extra” but I think most people would.
So $0 contribution to Oracle's revenue from fees in that anecdote, was my point. (The key word there in my comment was "actually", as in actually paying the fees, whereas you focused on the word "extra" instead. I don't debate that if the fees were actually paid, then yes that is quite obviously an extra fee.)
My original assertion was just that Meta is unlikely to be 'the most ruthless and shameless [of all the tech companies].' There's so much competition out there for that title.
But also for a long time the best available open-weights models on the market - this investment has done a lot to kickstart open AI research, which I am grateful for no matter the reasons.
While, it's indisputable about the current state of AR/VR. Zuck has a large exetensial risk to Microsoft/Apple/Google. If those companies want to revoke access to Meta's apps (ex [1]) they can and Zuck is in trouble. At one point Google was trying to compete with FaceBook with Google+ and while that didn't work, it's still a large business risk.
Putting billions into trying to get a moat for your product seems like prudent business sense when you're raking in hundreds of billions.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/facebook-google-scandal/