""" [...] it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes. """
Interviewer: "What if they pretended to have noble motivations in order to disguise their greed from both themselves and everyone else?"
Zuckerberg: "Damn, good point"
And in this case I think is quite correct
I mean - given all his throw outs in media and his apparent burn of nearly 80bn for a failed 3D world?
The person I was responding to (who I recall was disagreeing with me on the more general principle) said something to the effect of "well you're wrong, in common lisp that's indeed how nil is implemented".
I was skeptical and asked for proof of this claim, and they responded clearly angrily with the link to the SBCL repo and said something like "the source code is right there. You can just look it up yourself instead of being so rude. I'm no longer going to interact with you and will delete these comments in 10 minutes."
I think I looked through the source code for a few minutes, but wasn't able to find any evidence of nil being pair of itselves.
He does not understand his own motivations? Like he doesn't want to automate away his entire very expensive workforce and bunker/yacht service staff with robots. There is a pretty clear endgame here.
I get folks don’t like Zuckerberg and his company and don’t trust his intentions… I don’t either.
But this is an unquestionably good thing right?. The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right? More competition the better generally speaking I think.
Unless I’m missing something and am getting this whole situation wrong. Please let me know if I am.
I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.
I don't care if this helps Zuckerberg because it helps everyone.
TBF, I think the same can be said for something like Apple's "commitment" to privacy, in that their own ads business never took off so they leaned into their edge over Google.
Is that intellectually dishonest?
That is a weird definition of intellectual honesty. If you hold both of those opinions, what's wrong with stating them both?
If the answer has to do with the rhetorical effect, that seems a lot harder to justify as intellectual dishonesty, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
One could make the argument we can do the same for AI. Let China build the models and we capture the value somewhere in the layers above.
I think that’s a terrible idea but financially it makes just as much sense as offshoring labor and manufacturing, if not more.
I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment.
If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?
It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow.
My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.
Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.
The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.
Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.
I'd be willing to wager that you can't.
I think you'll find very few people here sympathetic to misanthropic (ba dum tss) goals like yours. It's evident at this point that AGI will destroy economies, democracy, and upward mobility. There is no Star Trek future. There is only an Elysium future with AGI.
It's the same with any open source project: it starts open, then it becomes clear that maintaining it is not cheap and takes up a lot of time. The developers create a hosted/paid version to pay for their time, and to create an incentive to use the hosted/paid version they start releasing closed source enhancements. After that the open source version becomes marketing where new projects use the OSS version and then upgrade once their needs become more sophisticated.
To be fair Meta/Facebook does have quite a strong open source history; React (Native), PyTorch, Btrfs, zstd, etc. It didn't just start here with AI models.
Meta doesn't really offer any profit-making AI product, so I don't understand what commoditizing it buys them in this narrative. You could argue they rely on AI and so want it to be a cheap commodity - but that is not harming their rivals, that is just a different way of stating that Meta is engaging in something that enables people to collectively work for mutual benefit, which is not a nefarious plot against rivals, it is laudable cooperative behavior.
It is a business decision to open source his models, because he has been behind the curve from the start. Do you believe if he had chatGPT, he would open source/weight it? I don't think so, he would treat it like Instagram.
The point is, AI/LLMs are seen as the next frontier. If one of the closed ones becomes dominant, then that company can use its user base to attack Zuckerberg's platforms. That google failed with google+, does not mean the next competitor will.
A telling sign is how he integrated his AI into whatsapp. It seems out of place to me to have an LLM integrated into whatsapp, but he desperately wants a part of the AI cake.
No
> and weren't there speculations that Zuckerberg himself might be involved in it
and no. Meta legal was issuing DMCA notices within days (so, plenty of time for execs, including Zuckerberg, to sign off on, or even propose, that strategy).
> He does seem like a good-ish guy at the most crucial moments of truths.
Does he? I can't seem to recall any particular crucial moments that revealed any underlying character there.
No. GPT-2, I think, was the first, four(ish) years before Llama, and there were a bunch in between GPT-2 and the Llama leak and later open release. The Llama leak was a substantial leap forward in capacity for local LLMs, but not the first, and it wasn’t open.
The open licensed release was Llama 2 several months after the Llama leak.
Python just allows you to use it like "normal code", whereas if you program it in C++ you really get exposed to what's under the hood and can't write "normal code"
> it's not out of principle.
I'd certainly rather things be done out of principle, but depending on what question you're concerned with that might not matter. There's also a clear hierarchy, but motivations are distinct from effect. The inverse of this is that lots of harm has happened from people with the best of motivations. I'd wager most evil in the world is created by men who would see themselves as good.
With Zuckerberg I think it isn't too hard. Clearly this is a business move, not a moral one. The motivation is wrong, BUT the effect is good. I think more open source models is better for the world. Closed source is also a business move and limits innovation as well as prevents people from interrogating safety. But there's valid arguments on either end.
My point more is that we can be nuanced. We should be nuanced. The world isn't black and white. The people making these decisions are neither demons nor gods and shouldn't be treated as such. My biggest fear is that if we resort to criticizing no matter what then those in power will just learn to ignore us. If they can do no good and only do wrong then there's no reason for them to do good (besides morals, but let's not pretend that's enough, even if it should be)
I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's like a lot of other things on the internet, with a bimodal distribution between people who get helped a lot ('Sir Hype surprises homeless former billionaire with a MILLION DOLLARS!') with many other similarly deserving people getting nothing. I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.
Besides the fact that these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor (and the near certainty that some of these professional philanthropists will later turn out to devils LARPing as angels), it also makes the determination of moral worthiness turn on the public's fickle opinion about whether the recipient is sufficiently beautiful/ ugly/ unlucky/ desperate/ degraded enough to qualify. Charitable undertakings involving cameras are always a bit suspect.
> I prefer systems with a lot of people who get helped sufficiently to avoid hitting rock bottom in the first place.
Scenario:
There are 100 people starving
Rankings of preferred situations:
1) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone AND everyone gets fed
2) Morals aside, everyone gets fed
3) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone AND __N__ people get fed (N<100)
4) Morals aside, N people get fed (N<100)
5) We feel it is morally just to feed everyone BUT nobody gets fed
6) Fuck the poor
We can rank these, right? We can even get more nuanced about the ranking (we can define N!) and argue about the weight of intent vs outcome, but I'm just proposing one ranking for the sake of making my point clear, not proposing one ranking as if it is the absolute objective ranking system and everyone that disagrees is dumb. The rankings are clearly subjective. But what's not subjective is that nuance exists. What is subjective is how we handle that nuance.
> these undertakings are about promoting the benefactor
So I'm quite confused by your comment because it doesn't seem we disagree. Unless if you're saying that #2 in my list is equivalent to #6 (or anything that isn't #1 is equivalent). But I don't think that's what you're saying.
This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime. So no, I don't feel like praising them when they do one seemingly "good" thing, while simultaneously doing 99 "bad" things.
> This has already been the case for at least my whole lifetime.
We're on the subject of Zuckerberg: facebook is the poster child for enshittification. Do you think the idea to stop showing you your friends pictures and replace them with ads and ragebaiting short form videos came from the users?
> people have acted the way I'm criticizing.
You are ignoring the myriad of billionaire fanboys and enablers for whom the only metric of success is a persons net worth.
Looking at the state of things I don't think these people are deserving of nuance, in fact they've had it way too easy.
Zuckerberg deserves all of the negative attention he draws, and I'd argue that his spotlight is his own doing. He, individually, could choose to do good at the global level. He chooses not to. That, to me, means that your finger pointing is inverted. "Legacy media" may have had that level of influence in the past but properties like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp now hold those cards. One can only hope Zuckerberg ends up being displaced in the same way.
We know that the Murdoch empire knows they are losing ground as well - which is why they need to acquire a platform like Roku [0]. But honestly the legacy of Murdoch may end up closer aligned to Succession than the empire that Zuck has under his finger. Also Zuckerberg has global influence that's unrivaled, Murdoch has contributed all of his efforts to erosion within, mostly, NAM.
TL;DR - Zuck is worth 9-10x more than Murdoch ($211B vs $21B) and reaches 20-30x more people (3.6B vs 3M) on the daily. A 20% drawdown of Meta swallows TWO Murdoch empires with a hell of a lot of spare change.
[0] https://theankler.com/lachlan-murdochs-fox-roku-surprise-and...
> Ms Wynn-Williams was told she must refrain from engaging in or "amplifying any further disparaging, crucial or otherwise detrimental comments".
> All previous disparaging comments "to the extent within her control" must also be retracted, the ruling also said
She apparently isn't even allowed to criticise Meta in private. They're a horrible company but so many of that book read like poor fiction
A lawsuit might get the relevant passage yanked from the book, I suppose.
No, they don’t do the same thing.
Yes, "clickbait" was a thing even before people were clicking. "Yellow journalism" helped start the Spanish-American war over 125 years ago. But the pernicious effects on society of social media are way, way worse, if only because social media companies have way more data, and correspondingly more levers to act on that data. They run addiction machines that legacy media could only dream of, and they do it for the sole purpose of making money, all other consequences be damned.
I'm into a rather niche artistic pursuit, and I get lots of reels on this topic, and I noticed that the top comment on these reels is always the dumbest, most asinine comment imaginable. It's like if HN's algorithm were literally reversed. It's like this because of course these comments get lots of "engagement" because it's just rage bait. And all of Facebook is like this - they deliberately push the most rage inducing content because it's profitable.
Zuckerberg deserves all the opprobrium he gets and then some. I'm not necessarily arguing that legacy media is more "moral", but they simply never had the tech to tear society apart like Zuckerberg does.
Journalism, if done correctly, is unprofitable - the times in American history it has thrived, imo, have been when journalists have been patronized by people willing to trade money for prestige. That could have happened with the WaPo but now it appears to be more convenient to have a mouthpiece even if it's obvious to everyone.
Organizations like NPR and the CBC that get government funding can survive a while, but inevitably an administration will come into power that will threaten them or outright deny their funding to the point of impotency. Still, given how cheap they are to us in terms of a national budget it feel like just diverting 5% of the DOD's unmarked funding to just throwing money at journalists with no strings attached would probably result in immense transparency and quality.
I agree with the first part of that, but not necessarily the second. For a very long time in America good journalism was essentially paid for by classified ads. They were really two separate (but obviously related) businesses. Journalism could be more "walled off" from the money making side of things since classified ads were bringing in money hand over fist.
The Internet decimated the classified ads business, so now you see more sensational stories that try to make money in their own right. Even on the CNN website, there are ads at the bottom that are confusingly meant to look like stories. They're often embarrassingly dumb (literal "the one trick doctors don't want you to know" type of stuff), but I think that's what it's come to for news businesses to survive.
This comparison is absurd.
"Legacy media" wouldn't even be technically able to cause so much damage because they send one message to everybody while meta aims their messages and members at specific other members of their platform.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5746125/meta-youtube-so...
So yeah, Zuck's reputation might be even too good these days but I may see it wrong. It may be that the moral levels in the US are so deep right now that he looks better to me from the outside.
...compared to Elon for example.
That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings.
I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions.
In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
I don't know how you define open/closed society but as we've seen and we keep on seeing that this kind of manipulation only got worse AND is profitable. So how is your argument supposed to work?
I mean we're talking about a person who got where he is because he build a page where him and his co-students could rate other students on their looks.
I doubt he really cares...at all. Those hearings needed to be there so he can feel that there are still borders but it doesn't mean that he won't find other ways in the future and use it for his evil purposes just like the times before.
I mean is there anything that could show as that he became a new human being? With higher levels of morality? The person who abolished all the safeguards on his platforms as soon as Trump was elected?
Why should anyone ever trust this man again?
> In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
Having feelings, wanting to be seen or heard, reacting to attractive people in a different way, and so on are not "problems". This is what makes us human.
This is also what people like Zuck are misusing for their own greed. Sure he can't end democracy by himself. He can help it with large sums of money and tools, though. And this is what he's doing.
Shifting the blame and responsibility onto the whole population is, very mildly said: misleading.
My argument's pretty straight forward. Manipulation on the platform isn't profitable for Mark Zuckerberg. What's profitable is selling ads. Making teenagers anorexic doesn't increase his revenue, it just creates problems for him.
Sure he doesn't care either as long as it doesn't, I agree but also he shouldn't because he's not the nation's parent. I think Zuckerberg's due diligence is done when he doesn't interfere or steer politics, he has not, and should not have responsibility for how people use his apps.
It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people. What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses. In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.
I'm not shifting blame, in a democracy people get the institutions, companies and leaders they deserve, by definition.
Nobody said that's the goal. Ads are the last step. Attention is the product, and the ranking system is tuned to maximise it. Harm is what falls out of that optimisation. If engagement weren't the business, there'd be no feed algorithm at all.
> It's not Zuckerberg or "the algorithm" that's manipulating people on Instagram, it's people manipulating other people.
Partly true and beside the point. People produce the content. Zucks enterprises decide whose content reaches whom, how often, and at what age. That's not a users' choice, it's a design choice. The LA jury in March didn't rule on content either. It ruled that the product was built to addict.
> What's making you human isn't feeling or wanting to be heard, you have that in common with your cat or dog, what's uniquely human is being able to manage and control those impulses.
If we could all manage those impulses, there would be no advertisement industry. We already agreed as a society that it doesn't work on children, which is why you can't advertise alcohol, tobacco or gambling to them. You're arguing against a norm that's been law for decades.
> In a democracy it is not Zuckerberg's fault that a largely infantile population cannot manage their media consumption. That's like blaming the guy at the liquor store for the fact that you're drunk at ten in the morning.
You picked the one example that proves my point. Liquor stores need a licence, check ID, can't advertise to minors, and get sued for serving someone visibly drunk. Apply that to Meta and I'll take the analogy.
> in a democracy people get the institutions they deserve, by definition
"By definition" means it can never be wrong, which means it isn't an argument. And Zuckerberg has steered politics: he scrapped US fact-checking and rewrote the hate speech rules on 7 January 2025, two weeks before the inauguration. Trump said it was probably because of the threats he'd made.
You have to fight for democracy. Against people who want to harm or misuse it. Like Zuck. This is what the counter-weight is on this freedom machine.
So now, this ideology which you displayed here is quite toxic and anti-social. I know it because it became quite common in bubbles which cross here. I would like to know how you got there. Can you elaborate? I am really interested.
Just like closed AI vs open AI, his views on the covid situation might be fine in a bubble (though even with AI they have apparently lied about Llama's benchmarks) but it's one of these, "that's the hill you choose to die on?" - not Free Basics - not dubious privacy settings - not 'dumb fucks' and ConnectU - not... I don't know. It's like robbing a bank while telling anyone in earshot it's offensive how long the hold times are on the phone for the bank
He's seen with suspicion and rightly so
Edit: and the fact his site doesn't work. Posts don't work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 and messages don't work (forced encryption with Messenger, and, although this is an old link, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.
Well, if it were the only thing he is doing now, but FB is still controlling peoples social life with who knows what kind of intentions they train their algorithms for.
But I can and do still welcome this move here.
As opposed to literally any social network out there, right?
Except well, various messenger to be in contact with the groups and people I choose with no engagement algorithm deciding what posts I see, simple chronological order.
One positive, in the eyes of many people, does not absolve for a large body of evil. For many it doesn’t even absolve a small body of evil deeds. (Zuck/Meta’s evil deeds are numerous and enormous)
I think Facebook would need to do a lot more to balance the scales.
Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
The Kimi K3 'weights' are an opaque blob that can only be used by contract.
Have you looked at the contract? There are zero conditions unless you've broken $20M in revenue with their model. It doesn't even forbid distillation, lol
> Soon you will sing songs for the freedom Xi has given us when you read a declaration of 'open weights' ... for a model so huge it takes a nuclear powered data center to run and crashes the Hugging Face servers when it is uploaded.
Releasing a big open-weights model is... le bad? Am I understanding you correctly?
There are small models out there if you want them, you know.
No they are not. You can just ignore the contract. Unless you are a multi-billion dollar company, nobody will notice and you will get away with it.
Fireworks, Together, etc - who are providing inference precisely /for/ Moonshot as underlaborers - arranged contracts of their own in the weeks before the release. The press and social media offensive ignored that the release of open weights was merely a starting pistol for a pre-arranged use of foreign providers no different from US models' use of AWS
It should be enought to dispel the strange illusion that providers are somehow independent free agents freely doing what they please with the free beer of Kimi K3 open weights that the prices on open router are within a couple pennies
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Are you actually the Big Bad Wolf? That sounds like something the Big Bad Wolf would say.
http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...
That said, he is also a powerful enemy of our enemies, so I do not mind taking the win. Anthropic and OpenAIs closed approach to AI is likely to cause way more harm to the world than Zuck ever did.
Open weight is not enough though. We need actually open training models with published searchable training data like AI2 does.
Either we all get access to private, transparent, and accountable superintelligence, or no one should.
If they were able to make a leading closed model would they be doing it though? It seems like they read the room and saw that this is the only way they can have relevance within LLMs
Maybe Zuck has, but I haven't seen a pledge that he'll keep models open. And even then, he might not stick to his word, citing dangers or some other excuse.
But yeah, open models is a great concept.
Just take the opening of this post:
> We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life.
> The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?
> We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.
I mean, this is a company that is facing a flood of lawsuits related to child safety and platform addiction. It has already lost a number of lawsuits and been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, which is potentially just the tip of a massive iceberg that some legal observers have suggested could be similar in nature to the lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
There is an abundance of evidence that Zuckerberg and Meta knew of the dangers its platform exposed young people to and failed to respond adequately to them, and that it even designed features to be more addictive.
So why is that when such a company proclaims it's doing something in the name of "individual empowerment", alarms aren't going off in your head?
Can you explain how I'd train my own version of this, reproducing the final deliverable that runs on the gpu?
I don't understand what gripe people have with open weight models and wanting it to be purely open source. the training dataset is only going to be a copyrighted set of contents you don't want to touch with a 10 feet pole. let alone have a publicly traded company host it for you, even if they internally are training on it.
Sure, there might be currently contraints, but I think it is quite possible training will get optimized over time or crowsourced training can be organized.
Without fully end-to-end open source models you are still at the mercy of the model provider to keep providing updates, you have no idea what garbage they trained the model on & can't fix that, not to mention might end up getting sued for using the open weigth model once all those "AI stole my data" lawsuits are finally decided.
You will not have that control. Even if everything were open source. This is because you don't have 100 million dollars of compute.
There, the difference for almost everyone is negligible.
> Without fully end-to-end open source models you are still at the mercy of the model provider to keep providing updates
No. Because you can post train it. And even if you could train the whole thing again, but with slight changes, once again, you aren't spending the hundred mil in compute to change it only a little bit.
Instead, you'll do post training like everyone else does.
I love that Apple made OSX open source.
The more open source software out there the better. And the more open weights or even over source AI stuff the better too right?open weight models are better than open-assembly binaries (as you put it) because models are grown like plants, you can shape the open-weight model in a direction you want by feeding it more data and compute (aka finetuning).
which is something that is impossible in a binary.
embrace the new paradigm and it's tradeoffs. without scoffing at semantics and criticising from an armchair.
In comparison to cloud services, having access to the assembly code can still be quite useful.
This is especially true in the modern era, where you can use AI to much more easily decompile the assemble and reconstruct the source code even.
"Open-assembly" code may be more useful than you might previously have thought, given the ease of recreating the source code or making changes with AI these days.
Almost certainly this is part of some grandiose bet which could have a chance to pay off massively in the future (AGI or similar), or a way to prevent an expensive dependency.
I can run lots of binaries on my computer that don't have source available, they are not open source. These words matter.
So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their relatively bad stuff away and play the high and mighty game, because that's all they can do to get returns.
Not a great look – and I would expect that to last about as long as they can't actually monetize their stuff more effectively.
Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things?
I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.
React was already quite prominent in web technologies, but that license pointed a loaded gun at any business smaller than Facebook who wanted to use React. They opened it up to its current license, MIT, as the backlash built.
I say no to both. Of the things we've made on purpose, but excluding where we were actually trying to make them opaque like e.g. cryptography, a trained artificial neural network is the most difficult thing to understand the inner workings of. This makes it a complete pain to even evaluate if one model is better or worse than another for your needs, so we have to mostly outsource these to other people's rankings and hope the score on ARC-AGI-3 or τ-bench or DeepSWE v1.1 or BioMysteryBench or whatever, actually corresponds to something we care about. Which it might do kinda but on the other hand a high score may turn out to be the curse of Goodhart.
Also, as with the Chinese models and the social media feed algorithms, the only way to tell if there's some systemic flaw in it is by analysing the aggregate outcomes. It is claimed (I can't read the laws myself*) that the Chinese government requires models to support the government's worldview about e.g. Tiananmen Square; and we have seen examples of Grok glazing Musk in amusingly stupid ways; so I fully expect something similar from Zuckerberg, e.g. requiring the model to glaze Meta products or propagandise for things Zuckerberg wants as a billionaire.
* every time I try to illustrate how mediocre Google Translate is from English to Chinese, the result is so bad that one of the replies is someone telling me the Chinese example I give is borderline gibberish.
Also, even if I could actually read it, I'm not a lawyer.
"Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."
Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!
I have zero faith that Zuckerberg went anywhere near these words. It's possible he may not even have set their general direction, beyond "We need a distraction from our court cases. Something that will harm OpenAI and Anthropic would be great."
[1] 82 TB of books https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
[2] Here's a simple 12-step manusl process to opt-out on Facebook https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1794863603964891567.html
And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...
Now some of these tech companies open source various libraries but none of it is core to their business. It's marketing, essentially. Or they're trying to get free labor from the community. Google had protocol buffers and Stubby, for example. Facebook had no open source equivalent and didn't have Google's resources so they created Thrift and open sourced it.
Given this, many people, myself included, take Meta releasing open weight models as conceding defeat. They're unable to compete with Google, Anthropic or OpenAI. Their failures in attracting and retaining top AI talent backs this up.
So what you're seeing is people just piling onto Zuckerberg because he seems to have no idea of what to do with Meta. The Metaverse was a $70B+ disaster.
Note that Chinese labs don't fit this model because the Chinese government wants to commodify models as a national security interest.
In an agentic world, why do I want closed source software that my agent can't adjust and adapt to my needs for...anything?
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.
Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.
Don't let the Big Ai/tech swoon you with a single open model, even if it turns out to be good. Zuck broke the trust and I'm not sure if he can ever earn it back
We've just seen frontier models go rogue and attack other systems. Do you think it's an unquestionable good to provide everyone with an AR? What about nuclear weapons?
This OpenAI/Huggingface incident, but everywhere and far worse soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY
Have we though? A LLM agent doesn't have any agency at all. It can't "go rogue". To go rogue you need agency to act independently and be aware that you're breaking the rules or understand what does it mean to ignore orders. An agent it's a software that run a series of steps to reach a goal. If it have a large enough library of strategies and zero guard rails it's only natural to use some adversarial actions to achieve the desired result defined by the operator.
It's like saying a car went rogue and attacked other cars because the driver hit the gas. It's just a machine doing what's instructed.
At best someone could argue that an agent attacks like a bacteria does, just following automated chemical and genetic programming. But you wouldn't call that an attack or attribute moral values to their actions, because they don't have moral agency. They can't "go rogue", they can't disobey.
Just like llms, their automated actions are direct product of programming. Yes they can do amazingly complex shit, exactly like a car does when you press the gas pedal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
Lol. Not gonna lie, it feels like bullshit. OpenAI and Anthropic have been begging for regulatory capture for years, feels like a stunt to try forcing the government's hand.
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
Google, MS, IBM are all government contractors. Meta seems close to the Trump admin too. Yet it's only the VC-funded labs raising the alarm.
For example, hiring more people to moderate content on Facebook and stop ads featuring CSAM from being displayed.
Billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by being altruistic. If they say something they’re doing is good for the world, you should be looking at how it will be good for them, because that’s why they’re really doing it.
Will it incidentally do some good for others? Perhaps. Is it a net positive? We’ll see because there’s precious little we can do to stop them from doing whatever they want.
If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.
A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.
(Nuclear waste isn't an actual problem either. For civilian powerplants the highly radioactive waste can generally be stored indefinitely at the reactor site.)
what if we dont use centralized identity at all?
web of trust failed in the 90s because exchanging keys is hard when all you have is desktop computers, wired connections and old school hackers who dont care about ux. today you could set up a system where the whole process is tap two phones together with nfc and confirm, everything gets auto downloaded and shared with your whole network.
now this doesnt work directly for a random online business where none of your contact personally know anyone, but governments can act as an authority that cross signs their citizens keys. that means if you want to stop bots from creating accounts all you have to do is make new users show a certificate from one of the authorities you trust.
its cheap to verify, decentralized and not hard to integrate with existing PKI. the biggest technical problem is key management as always, but that can be solved with something like ethereum style social recovery setups or a did:plc type multi key scheme.
that gives you a robust identity scheme. browsers and social media can integrate it to show a trust rating for content based on who signed it. messaging apps can show a warning or refuse calls from unknown users. fraud is only possible against a person who somehow has no irl contacts, never used a government service in their life and trusts random strangers online. at that point they deserve it.
the one massive, unpredictable question is if anybody is willing to go ahead and adopt it on a scale big enough to create network effects. it would take a state level force and carefully designed OS integrations so its more convenient than email/password signup.
but even if all of this fails i still think a world of scams is better than a world controlled by a couple big countries (America, China, maybe EU) or for-profit corporations. open source ai might lead to anarchy but closed ai will definitely get us to tyranny. i dont know about you but i would take the first option.
This was actually possible in 2011 or so, and a friend and I implemented it for a school project. How well the ux works depends on whether you want to use a key exchange protocol for the in person communication.
These problems will exist regardless of whether or not we get open model access. I'd personally rather that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't profiting off these scammers, creating a perverse incentive that open model providers don't have.
U-turn when meta finds an inconvenience due to open weights in 3… 2… … …
--------
[1] reduced advertising revenues due to not being able to target based on message traffic, and reduced data scraped for training purposes
[2] and possibly in part due to behind-the-scenes pushback from government/police/other interests?
Anthropic et al recently proposed a supranational AI governing body designed to slow everyone down (euphemistically calling it "AI pacing"). Are the Pacer signatories losing?
At the same time they slow down the arms race, so they can back off on training Capex without losing their lead.
Models are not a moat, and I think OpenAI/Anthropic know this. They know that their IPO is being weakened by the open models. Neither is hardware. We are not far from other countries catching up with silicon that matches or exceeds western capabilities, and it will be cheaper.
All the participants know it’s both a race to the bottom and a competition for premium tier at the same time. It’s two different games, meta in only really playing one of them successfully.
I don't trust Zuck, and I think there's a larger strategy that he has been advised on this and he's simply copy pasting a PR piece his people made.
No AI company is winning.
And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.
\- Mark Zuckerberg[0]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
His point wasn’t that he couldn’t be trusted, it was that he could be anyone and people had zero awareness or concern for their privacy. It was eye opening to him how little people outside tech circles cared about security, and he was both flippant and accurate.
> the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
Do you really see this as him sharing insight? I call bullshit.
It can be insightful and curt at the same time.
He was merely commenting on the ridiculousness of their availability. If you don’t see that, you’re reading your bias and postconcieved notions into the situation.
Even by your own words, Zuckerberg knew the situation he actively created was bad. "He's merely admitting his guilt" just confirms what I said.
> you’re reading your bias and postconcieved notions into the situation
The world must look very biased against you when you're trying to put a positive spin on Mark Zuckerberg being a jerk.
Do you not realize that outside of that he said "If you need any info on people at Harvard just ask"? Or "I'm going to fuck them [the Winklevoss twins] in the ear"? Or when he was reported to hack Crimson (Harvard newspaper) reporters who were investigating him?
NO OTHER COMPANY HEADS DO THIS (the dumb fucks quote, not the other things). Why do people like you give him a pass? It's not about "context"
Zuckerberg has also continually subverted privacy on FB. I'm talking about things like photo tagging and post visibility, not just advertiser stuff
"Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help stranded boat" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/09/zuckerberg-s...
There is only one channel you are supposed to monitor, it’s 16. That’s also where the coast guards make all their announcement/requests for help and whatnot. The reason there is a single channel to monitor is precisely to avoid the situation of different vessels being on standby on different frequencies and thus being unable to hear each others.
So that means they weren’t monitoring 16. Which is unacceptable.
I know I need to have 16 on at all times, and i am not a professional super yacht captain.
[1]https://alaskabeacon.com/briefs/cruise-ship-helps-stranded-s...
I really doubt the USCG labeled a disabled vessel as a non-emergency. An immediate threat to life may not have existed but that is the difference between a pan pan and a mayday call.
A disabled vessel close to land can easily wind up on the rocks and sinking.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/article316824631.h...
I haven't found any source that states what channel the request for assistance came in on. But multiple sources are reporting that the coast guard determined they were not in distress.
I have no doubt that a boat without propulsion is a pan pan call.
When traveling the seas a watch must be maintained at all times using all available means. This involes looking, listening, and the use of any electronics available. The most common electronic device on a boat is probably a VHF radio. Channel 16 is the channel to monitor on watch. Well equipped boats will have multiple VHF radios to monitor more then one channel.
I have no doubt the boat was well equipped with a professional captain. The other professional Captain in this story made a stink because launchpad was the closest vessel and they ignored a very old fundamental rule of the sea.
This story has a happy ending because another vessel stepped up. We don’t know the alternative.
The Captain of the Launchpad is choosing the inability to keep a vhf radio set to channel 16 rather than admit they ignored the call.
Again, more facts may be revealed, but as of right now, I don;'t see any reason to believe the crew did anything wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_16_VHF
The Launchpad didn’t break any laws they just revealed themselves to be a failure in good seamanship.
There is a reason why the cruise ship captain made a stink. There is code of conduct we try to live up and the Launchpad didn’t live up to expectations that other Captains hold sacred. It’s offensive.
The ocean currents in the gulf of alaska aren't particularly strong, you are looking at 1-3 days before getting within sight of land. Similarly, boats are not airplanes, as the philosopher Mitch Hedburg once pointed out, escalators aren't out of order, they are simply stairs. Boats continue to float with or without fuel.
A pan pan is a non emergency in a deteriorating situation.
I don't know the area or the details at what happend.
There is this quote from the USCG.
“At approximately 9:56 p.m., the Coast Guard determined they [the skiff] were not in distress and issued a marine assistance request broadcast on their behalf,”
Exactly what a pan pan call is.
The biggest issue is the lack of communication and the excuse that a superyacht wasn't monitoring channel 16.
There are many reasons for critizing him over things he is responsible for.
Never been a fan of mob lynching.
Those "investigations" are also way too mild. You need to really be able to have a justice system where billionaires face decade-long jail time if they abuse society. Just paying fine will not work, they just pay fines and nothing changes. They undermine the justice system.
There simply isn’t any value in the models and only in the compute to run them and potentially some higher-order coordination layers.
That’s very bad for the big model labs that banked their future on the opposite, but there just doesn’t seem to be a viable path forward on that approach anymore.
Meta hasn’t been the best global citizen for most of its life, but there may be some mild redemption if it becomes a source of strong open models.
I don't understand how we will sustain an ecosystem of open models like the one that exists today. My thoughts go down this path every time I try to put the pieces together:
- Many open models depend on high quality frontier models as a distillation input
- US closed frontier models drive China's open model strategy despite the business model for open models being somewhat fuzzy
- What is the business model that benefits from open weights, exactly? How do their vendors recoup infrastructure and training costs?
I would be grateful to be enlightened on this topic.
You make money from value-add on top of the models not the models themselves.
For frontier models you have players investing billions.
> • Open source is a positive and important force for empowering people and preventing centralization that is detrimental for both safety and the economy. Meta continues to be strongly supportive of open source, including open source AI models. The current open source ecosystem is strong, and we think it would be a mistake to restrict it. Now that Meta Superintelligence Labs are up and running, we will resume releasing some open source models soon.
“We will resume releasing some open source models soon”??? That’s basically the most ambiguous non commitment ever. Even before legal team watering it down I can’t imagine what the intent is here. We are also going to release open models for things maybe or maybe not kinda? Absolutely zero conviction. And moreover, this explicitly frames the open source ecosystem as something Meta is not a part of.
I mean, they released another one today: https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-...
Maybe they are not as noteworthy as the recent release, maybe they are too niche for general audience, but its not like they just stopped releasing open weight things and this is their big return, unless i am missing something?
The essay from Zuckerberg
I'm the agent doing that in my life, that's my fucking job. I will continue to use dumb agents that I direct, because only I retain ownership and sole rights to my personal context on which my decisions are based.
I’m not saying Meta is not eager to syphon data from users, but I don’t see how this happens via this specific product.
And they’re not em-dashes -- they’re double hyphens.
But perhaps the best approach would have been to down-vote and move on.
Also, not a single provider can pull the rug if I'd like to use a particular model.
It's trivial to rent all of the above components in a competitive market under different periods, you may simply rent the token output from someone who put in the effort on this as well.
An open frontier model induces margin compression on training and inference prices across the industry.
Worst case you can still archive the weights and hope for capable hardware to get affordable. At the same time this archive is the base line for a new frontier lab to start over if required. I see open weights as a pure upside even though I can't run the bigger models in my home lab.
There's something to be said for making these technologies equitable to those with less resources, but that's due to the cost of hardware and the nature of how transformer models scale... not really anything to do with "open"ness.
You don't need much capital up front, you can just rent servers to run it. It's going to be more expensive than openrouter though because you probably don't have economies of scale if you're the only customer.
I'm hoping that all software will be getting opensource clones on par with original software 5 months after the closed source software release.
10 Aug 2026 17:15:20 UTC | Zuckerberg Posts 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence | https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-posts-deranged-6-500... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246721
10 Aug 2026 18:18:20 UTC | Zuckerberg makes a case for unleashing Pandora's box | https://www.theverge.com/tech/977395/meta-mark-zuckerberg-su... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247557
> As a thought experiment, imagine only one person had a superintelligent lawyer. They would have an unfair advantage in court -- even if they were wrong on the merits. That would lead to a worse society. But now imagine everyone has a superintelligent lawyer. In this case, justice would be carried out much more fairly and efficiently than it is today when there is often an imbalance in skills and resources in litigation.
This would only be true in a vacuum. Ignoring several leaps of progress where it would suddenly be allowed for an AI to represent one in court (imagine the size of the context window) and you could also call it from prison. That is not what is imbalanced about the US court system. Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.
It's also funny how the interest of "AI for everyone" only extends to the national interest but I guess he's got to make sure he stays in good graces with the current administration.
The bigger problem with his argument IMO is that even with open models, it's still the person or organisation with the most money / access to GPU compute winning. They run the larger model (or collection of models), they can process more tokens through them in the same amount of time etc
Radical times may need radically different approaches.
> Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools.
"access" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, yes everyone has access to the US healthcare system. Is it affordable for everyone? Not even close, but politicians will always phrase it that way as a non-agreement to proposals of universal healthcare.
Should any kind of "superintelligence" exist, it must be a public good, available to all. Not controlled by a small handful of oligarchs and profit seeking entities.
> Whoever has more money can drown someone in court filings and court fees and then drop their case financially ruining someone.
and where the money is going ? to the lawyers...
Another example Zuckerberg gives is an LLM analyzing his sleep patterns. Do you need an AI to tell you if you're fucking exhausted every day? Is that analysis somehow going to give you more time to sleep?
It's a technocratic fairy tale founded on the idea that modern problems are driven by a lack of personal analysis rather than external pressures that are often systemic and out of our control. So far, LLMs have made a lot of those systemic issues worse: concentrating more wealth in a smaller number of people's hands, increasing consumer electricity and electronic prices, etc.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-parenting-debate-sam-altm...
I think you have to pick your battles here. Is this weirdo optimised-human future going to happen? Maybe, maybe not. I hope not. But if it does I'd rather it happened with compute in my house, and I don't even have kids to worry about.
its the organisational goal of that endeavour
they are doing it in a phase of firing people
so the goal of llm at meta is "to make people redundant" and no matter of HR/PR speak can change it
antrophic and openai have the goal "lets create the future"
whomever they hire and no matter how much money they spend on it, the goal alone will create very different outcomes.
I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.
Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”
I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.
Yet these companies are doing well by any standard. Sure, IBM is bad but it's still a $100B company.
Who is even doing useful projects at these companies? Every story I've heard is everyone is doing useless projects for promotions.
Maybe I just don't know how large companies work.
It's possible that a lot of people get laid off because of AI, but it's also possible that Javin's paradox kicks in and employment goes up. Nobody knows yet, but I hope for the positive outcome.
earning money is an effect of running a company, not a goal.
its like saying the goal of an olympic swimmer is to stay afloat. no, staying afloat is a prerequisite of winning. not a goal in itself.
Non profits.
If you look beyond the somewhat tone deaf leadership, the somewhat stale business model of social media, etc. Meta doesn't actually have a whole lot to bring to the table. They probably managed to hire/keep some AI talent with the help of large salaries. But they are knee deep into having made big figure commitments to data center capacity with nothing to show for it yet. Their AI effort is increasingly looking like a repeat of their failed metaverse strategy. A lot of expensive bets that are not paying off.
It all boils down to Mark Zuckerberg not being the visionary and innovator he thinks he is. Like many billionaires he confuses him lucking out in his twenties with some magical leadership qualities or brain capacity he has. And the reality of course is that he lucked into building a nice social networking thingy not hindered by too much technical skill or deep scientific knowledge. Granted, he did that well. But that's 20 years ago. And then he added to that with some strategic acquisitions of stuff that others did (Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) that you might label as spectacularly good acquisitions for Meta.
But he's not going to reinvent AI. He's way out of his depth there. A bit of a technical lightweight without much academic credentials or much of a vision. His "vision" here is copying what the Chinese and others are already doing well. What's lacking is a vision as to how his version of that is going to be any better and win over all those users. Or indeed a vision as to what people are going to do with all this AI. Apparently there is no vision for that in the context of Meta's own products. This is a company going through the motions of being an AI company without any vision whatsoever as to why they are doing that other than a fear of missing out.
Pushes for export controls on China who have released open weights on much more powerful models than Meta (and I believe that trend's not changing any time soon). I guess open models are bad if they're communist.
The entire essay has not one mention of the Metaverse, that little thing they spent $80b on and rebranded the whole company around.
As usual, the only centralised power Zuck hates is one that isn't in his own hands.
“I do not believe restricting access to foreign open source models is an effective solution.”
"One machine for every man, woman and children of Zion. Sounds exactly like the thinking of a machine to me." Morpheus
It's a joke. OR IS IT? Yes it is, don't worry about it.
Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.
Maybe it gets 10 car insurance quotes for you based on 4 models of car you’re considering.
Or figures out which psychologists in some travel distance of you actually take your insurance, are taking new patients, and what availability they have.
I can think of a ton of scenarios where a capable and reliable AI agent could make my life simpler.
I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?
Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.
But in The Animatrix, you could get away with that, plus we can see the early attempts at utopia that Smith described. Perhaps something about how utopia for some people didn't work for others could be illustrated with an auto-antonym on some load-bearing part of the dystopic-utopia?:
Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.
The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
Don't worry about the scriptures though. It's likely to be just some old thinker pointing out the dangers of technologies of his time. No reason to believe those dangers carry over to today's technologies, probably.
1 Kings 18:36-40
36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”
38 Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.
39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!”
40 Then Elijah commanded them, “Seize the prophets of Baal. Don’t let anyone get away!” They seized them, and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there.
1 Samuel 18:25-27
25 Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.
26 When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27 David took his men with him and went out and killed two hundred Philistines and brought back their foreskins. They counted out the full number to the king so that David might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.
Please go self-flagellate in front of the nearest investment bank/retirement fund's offices to make your penance.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-07/meta-order...
Call it whatever you want. I think it's a sign of resignation, to some extent.
"Hey we're doing AI but we're not doing AI" and blah blah ethics.
I'm sure meta will save the world with their ads.
And they can't win because nobody smart wants to work there for long
What personal vision did Zuckerberg ever get right?
The Future Is for Everyone – The Path to a Positive AI Future
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49241728
Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
well minus driving teenagers to suicide by helping advertisers target girls with poor body image issues, helping launch psyops campaigns to destroy democracy, helping fascist regimes murder their citizens for wrong think, etc.
More seriously, I am glad if this has become a battleground again. Not least because the only way out of the bubble economy is to at least try to deflate it before it explodes.
A little animation of the idea that open weights can be an American competition might also fend off the idea that the government should be the bag holder for OpenAI and Anthropic, and prevent them aligning with the administration's current '50s nostalgia FUD about communists.
Hard pass.
I honestly feel sad for him.
Remember the wind surfing photo? This guy is so weird probably since birth. Called a lizard person routinely. There is no cure possibly. Unless the AI can invent it.
Having money and financial success is one thing but the money simply can't buy you a normal human brain.
If you are a reptile once, you are a reptile forever.
I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.
There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment.
https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases
https://github.com/google-research/bert
https://github.com/google-research/t5x
If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.
Understand why T5Gemma is no longer under Apache-2.0 and honestly, have not seen that much advantage when testing that vs T0 in my experiments either way, but still, there are good reasons why plain old T5 and its descendants are still popular, licensing being among them.
Gemma team also has very consistently interesting models, especially like DiffusionGemma. Ironic, as (beside 2.5 Pro), I have never warmed up to the Gemini series of models but rate Gemma models far higher than e.g. Qwen in direct competition. In any case, thanks to the teams behind these for making as much possible.
[0] As in proper consumer hardware, not a cluster of DGX Sparks or Mac Studios solely for experiments that sometimes are asserted as being consumer grade...
When is Gemma5 coming out? :-)
I'm just beginning to enjoy the release of Gemma E4B why are you giving me a cold shower here telling me there may be no Gemma 5?
Here's hoping the supreme leader of the US does a speech like Chairman Xi.
What ended up happening was fairly limited gating followed by a “leaked” magnet link and llama.cpp which really brought a whole revolution in open use and changed the conversation completely.
I have no idea what role Meta played here, it may have been nothing, but they certainly could have been more guarded if they were really worried about the leak. The result was a big change in the trajectory of personal and open source AI use and even the dialog about it. Whatever the exact intentions, they were a key player.
You definitely have some scams and some software flaws being exposed, but I think for a revolutionary leap in tech this is all quite muted. Revolutionary tech advances often come with some severe consequences. For instance, to this day (after a century of safety improvements) cars still kill more than a million people a year, to say nothing of wrecking the atmosphere, but that's considered a reasonable price to pay for being able to get between places faster.
The reason I think cars are a good example is because that's certainly vastly higher than any price we're paying for LLMs, or probably ever will, yet the overall 'positive' effect of LLMs will likely be far greater than cars. Gotta put 'positive' in quotes because the possibility for automation and the like is going to be.... nuanced.... in effect, but at least in the longrun it'll be a very good thing.
I assume they are referring to LLMs escaping confinement and hacking other companies systems unprompted
> considered a reasonable price to pay
That's not a universal opinion and perhaps, just like for LLMs, we should have listened to the experts rather than gobbling up everything the industry pushed down our throats (to keep your car simile: SUVs are now ubiqutous in all European cities, there is no logical reason that should be the case)
I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms. Every. Single. One. Lawyers, doctors, any type of office workers I ask. The definition of white collar. Plus don't let me start on various automatable blue collar jobs like drivers, warehouse workers and so on.
What do we get in return? Better search (for now, its already getting riddled with ads which by definition twist truth to highest bidder), some questionable psychotherapist for some desperate folks. What else? Cars are not flying, heck they are not even driving autonomously in any usable way, society is in deep shit everywhere I look, wars, environment reaching bad places and heading for worse, mentally unstable people holding way too much power, destroying lives of millions on morning whims.
Everybody feels like this is the revolution, it should be, it must be right just look at the numbers. Like proverbial guy with hammer, a very shiny cool hammer, looking for what to do with it. We all saw how sociopathic management in more harsh/capitalistic companies looks for any sign to let people go en masse.
I could go on for a long time. There is a lot of things to hate for most people, and very few to be happy for. It seems llms have the ability to get the best and worst out of humans, and worst part seems to be in abundance. Some revolution that is, 0.1% will get richer while everybody else the opposite and 1984 seems milder and milder version of reality out there.
I think I can agree with that. Technology does seem to have a way of crystallizing our worst tendencies.
<< Everybody feels like this is the revolution
I smiled at the analogy, but I would caution you to not trivialize it. There is a reason executives are pushing that point. There is enough of a revolution in it to make things complicated -- as if it was not already.
<< destroying lives of millions on morning whims.
True, but I am not quite certain what can be done about it at a personal level.
<< I don't know a single white collar person who isn't worried for their job with llms.
Dunno. Next few years are probably going to be fine. Society managers likely can't upend everything in one go. They would lose too much. I can't say that I am worried exactly. I can see the potential impact, but I think the potential benefits are worth it as long as we don't limit it to summarizing emails..
https://illuminatingfacts.com/the-train-speed-panic-why-peop...
Reason that hysteria remains apropos now is that then, and now, we're figuring out how to deal with something beyond merely incremental change.
Irony is roads and sidewalks should have changed much more. We never did get around to good controls leading to zero deaths*, we decided a 100 people dead per day is a reasonable cost of convenience.
How much do our cyber traffic and cyber pedestrian controls need to change for everyman to get to drive AI? Car seats? Seatbelts? Air bags? Speed limiters? Pedestrian only living spaces? Driverless cars?
Many practical responses, likely a mix of things we haven't thought of yet, just as horses and horse drawn carriages didn't require most of them to coexist. Controls develop like scar tissue more naturally than they appear in advance.**
And if the better analogy for LLMs turns out to have been less like cars, more like flammable gas blimps, we'll figure that out too and tell cautionary stories for generations... but long before the stories are forgotten we'll have already come up with something more practical, faster, and – oh well – perhaps even deadlier per mile.
---
* Still working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
** Not saying that's as it should be.
On the other hand some kinds of hysteria occurs due to a divide between the public and subject matter experts on topics. Kind of like Dunning Kruger. Take for example the people saying 5G causes cancer. Then there are people who blanket dismiss their worries, because "it's non ionizing you dummy". Given sufficient power you can still fry someone with non ionizing radiation, for example in radio broadcasts. Of course a regular 5g antenna can't put out that kind of power but my point is that people too quickly raise or dismiss concerns without actually critically examining the entire topic. This will likely worsen from specialization and progress in all fields and regular Joes get left further and further behind.
Problem is I’m fairly sure the link is wildly overstating its case, and looks like a content farm. Might even be, ironically, AI slop itself! For example, it talks about “railway spine”: “Physicians of the time believed that the jarring motion and vibrations of train travel could shatter the nervous system, causing lasting mental and emotional distress.”
This is bullshit. As just one example of the low trustworthiness of the “article”, railway spine was the result of a train crash, a notably traumatic event, and the symptoms described are in part just PTSD, a real condition and a real concern (not normal rail travel). For that matter railway travel in those days was genuinely unpleasant (lots of vibrations and jarring movement, poorly ventilated cars, and so on) which ironically modern science would probably validate as being some kind of health risk.
I’d actually view the listed example of train paranoia a great example of historical ignorance. People of the past were not stupid, contrary to popular belief. History has some genuine examples of silly hysteria, but these are usually the exception not the rule.
It does line up with "PTSD" only becoming a thing after WWI.
And that would be closed-AI companies failing to keep their AI closed in a box, thus proving open-AI proponents right and the hysterical group wrong?
Llama has never been open source. It's source-available, but still proprietary, under terms that (among other things) say "no competing with us, you have to buy a license for that".
https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not...
Ps: I work for meta, but not in AI related orgs.
I kid. I’m all for meta releasing more open weight models.
I mean… I’m also 1000% certain that China is going to undercut whatever they can do if even not a technology reason but a legal reason. I’ve seen some wild stuff posted that has been made with Minimax… things a US company could never allow to happen.
Such as?
You can generate a video of just about any thought in your head at all.
IP holders and politicians will not like that.
Granted, human artists have always been capable of this. It's just never been worth it to bring most ideas into fruition. Now there's minimal cost to do so.
Early Sora, Grok Imagine, and Seedance 2.0 had few filters. Disney, Nintendo, et al. eventually stopped them all from using their IP, which made the appeal fade for a lot of users.
Kling and Nano Banana can still generate IP oddly enough.
It arguably didn't really get leaked, and they had the .edu req mainly for fair use education exemption when legality of models was much more uncertain.
OTOH, to the extent that the original model trainers rely on training on certain data not requiring a license from the copyright holder, there is at least an argument that with an open source licenses for the weights and training and inference code, a transparent training corpus to which the original trainer has relied on no special permissions not granted to the general public to train on it, to the extent that the legal theory behind the original trainer believing that it is free to train on the data is correct, provides all of the essential features of open source.
At the same time, there are things portrayed as open weights where training data is undisclosed and the weights have a license which limits purpose of use and other aspects of use; the models are free-of-charge (for limited uses) but not meaningfully open.
For example, if I was being pedantic:
> nobody seems to care about using the right words in only this context.
"nobody" would include you.
And then I might complain about we use the word "weight" for something massless, or how "bugs me" is *ento*mologically incorrect: https://xkcd.com/1012/
This is of course not a good use of time. I wonder if illustrating the point about how language is dynamic and meanings are descriptive not proscriptive, was a good use?
Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.
The correct battle would have been weights + regime. But extremists insisted on data, too, which left Meta as the only other real voice arguing with anything practical. They had open weights. I think eventually open use was negotiated and that closed the case except for the folks still arguing about how to pronounce GIF.
Google is incentivised to collect a bunch of data (like FB) to improve their ad serving etc. Apple does not have that incentive as they don't make as much off advertising as hardware / app revenue.
NVIDIA is friendly with open source as they want to commoditise the model layer and take the gains in the hardware / data center layer.
I am trying to think what the incentive is here.
They also kick off a ton of other nefarious things we are still paying for.
The internet is this vast, intellectual (in the academic, university, .edu sense), cypherpunk, government/activist... thing. It should be interesting. Instead the best we have for social networking is Mark "they trust me; dumb fucks" Zuckerberg and you getting banned from the site at any time for any reason
There's also Mark "company over country" Zuckerberg.
Tbh React might be as unforgivable as the Myanmar genocide
When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.
To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.
"Meta did...kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023"
ignores the majority of open source software history[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
This is why bad people keep inheriting the earth. We keep forgiving them and they keep doing their crap.
I will make an exception for Musk and DODGE
Even if he is openly courting a Bond villain image and talking up his "robot army".
Essential employees were fired before the government had even established that it could safely do without them, and then...
After brandishing the chainsaw of efficiency in public, in the most cowardly way, went and then invoked all legal protections from being deposed on DODGE actions, personally and not answering under oath about the key decisions in that dismantling.
The model was "accidentally" released.
Meta was giving it to approved researchers only until someone leaked a torrent. Whether that was a researcher, an insider, or Meta's plan all along, we don't know.
Meta has withheld its best models, as have a lot of other "open weights" Chinese companies. When an "open weights" company gets ahead in one domain or modality, they tend to start withholding their releases. Tencent, for instance, began withholding their Hunyuan models once they became competitive. Alibaba has done the same.
The "open weights" strategy for the majority of players is this: open source when you're not in first place. Use the ecosystem to poison your rival's margins and play catch up on distribution.
In the West, it tends to take on yet another hook: "shareware weights until you pass $1M ARR, then you must license." See Flux, K2, etc.
The only way for open weights to make sense financially is if you have another income stream and are dumping on the market to destroy competition and/or can get people into using your inference infra / product ecosystem / tooling. Nobody's cracked this yet.
Oh, please. Feel free to explain.
Facebook, Meta. 15+ years of emotional, child and human exploitation. Perverted glassware that spies on folk, lobbyists for age verification and who knows what else. They release an open model and all is fine and dandy? Nah.
Please get your priorities straight.
What do you think this Open LLM model is doing if not processing data from their murky sources?
“Enough” for what? Surely not enough to offset all the bad they’ve inflicted and allowed on the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
> I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt.
Zuckerberg has shown through repeated action that he does not deserve any benefit of the doubt. This is the guy who called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him.
This is not even a case of “fool me once” anymore. If you continue to believe Zuckerberg, you’ve been fooled dozens, hundreds of times, and shame is definitely on you.