How does this work fits with their mission of destroying the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers, I cannot explain.
They also work hard to force users into their walled gardens and to stop the useful content users to this day feed into they intentionally broken services from escaping into the real world wide web of hyperlinked and discoverable content.
In short they're at the forefront of making the internet harmful to society and less useful to almost everyone.
This is the funniest thing I’ve read on here.
Meta's ultimate goal is immoral. It's not justified if a few projects do some good.
Their mission is to make Zuckerberg rich and powerful. That’s the sole purpose of Meta, everything else is incidental. It just so happens that they also destroy the fabric of society and the mental well-being of teenagers but it’s not their primary goal, they just don’t care about the side effect. It would be all the same if they were poisoning coral reefs and giving wedgies to grandmothers instead. As long as the process benefits Zuckerberg in the end, nothing else matters to the company.
We used to have something resembling a democracy, now we have an evolving neo-fascist hellscape created by a cabal of the least interesting tech people on the planet.
Meta earned a ton of goodwill by doing this -- it was very brave, and very influential. In my eyes, it outweighs everything negative they've ever done.
Are you being sarcastic? Please let it be that you’re being sarcastic.
You can't study them, you can't modify them, you can't improve them, you can't look into how they are built etc.
When you run a proprietary program (like Adobe Photoshop or a closed-source game) on your PC, you get a compiled binary of machine code. The high-level logic is stripped out, variables are obfuscated, and the EULA legally forbids you from decompiling, reverse-engineering, or modifying the binary.
With an open model, you get the actual Python/C++/CUDA code defining the exact mathematical structure of the model. And you get a weights file, which is an unencrypted, open array of floating-point numbers representing every synaptic strength in the network.
So you can inspect the exact mathematical state of the model at any arbitrary moment during inference -- in other words, you can study open models. You can fine-tune or quantize them -- in other words, you can improve them quite significantly! And much much more.
Naturally, they do it to earn "some respect" from those who otherwise see them clearly.