back to article Meta spruiks benefits of open sourcing Llama models – to its own bottom line

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has told investors that open sourcing its Llama AI models is not entirely altruistic – he thinks it will also save his social media conglomerate money. Speaking on Meta's Q3 2024 earnings call, Zuck was asked how the social media conglomerate plans to build the massive infrastructure required to …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "made $270 million in the quarter but lost $4.4 billion"

    That's about $16 lost for every dollar spent.

    And they're still spending.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ozbureau Model of Language?

    The kraken spruiks!?!? --> translate --> The polypus orates!?!? That's linguistic malacology at its most torturous ... (I love it!)

    1. Jan 0

      Re: Ozbureau Model of Language?

      Bonzer spruik, mate.

  3. lglethal Silver badge
    Go

    Come again?

    3.26 billion people visited Facebook each day in September.

    The number of people with internet access according to statista is 5.45 billion. So 2/3 of the internet going population of the world used Facebook? Not bloody likely.

    3.26 billion logins I could probably believe. But how many of those were actually bots, I do wonder. Personal experience shows very few people under the age of about 20 have a Facebook account. And less and less people in my circle are using it (although those that do are the type to check Facebook a hundred times a day, which no doubt helps those figures). I know, I know personal experience does not always correlate to world wide use cases. But I still call bollocks on the figures...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Come again?

      "An average of 3.29 billion people used Meta's products each day of September"

      What's App. I've been dealing with a lot of small local businesses and trades people recently. First question from them is always "do you have whats app?". "Sorry no, have you heard of email?" "deep sigh".

      Most young people I know still use Instagram a fair amount. Threads seems to be doing better than expected. I can buy this number. Don't forget "Internet Basics" - Zuckerborg's attempt to get Facebook into the hands of people in developing countries.

      1. Robigus

        Re: Come again?

        Despite never having had any Meta accounts, I have been told in the past "Didn't you get the [item]? I WhatsApp'd you."

        I imagine somewhere there's a shadow account waiting to be activated and were it to be so, much pointless guff would pour forth.

        It's good to be conciously apart from such things. The sort of people who say "Did you see on Facebook.." are generally the sort of people I'm already wary of.

  4. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

    Stone soup, except Zuck gets the soup and we're all left with wet rocks.

    Zuckerberg replied that making Llama available sees "a lot of researchers and independent developers … work on Llama and they make improvements and then they publish it, and it becomes, it's very easy for us to then incorporate that both back into Llama and into our Meta products like Meta AI or AI Studio or Business AI."
    Get devs to work for free and you take all the profits.

    The business model sounds familiar. . . something called Chasebook? Facerook? Rakeschnook? Don't tell me, I'll think of it.

  5. frankster

    "leaning so heavily into open source" by not releasing the source data that created their model

    1. O'Reg Inalsin

      From an earlier reg article: ... the community agreement forbids the use of Llama 2 to train other language models; and if the technology is used in an app or service with more than 700 million monthly users, a special license is required from Meta. It's also not on the Open Source Initiative's list of open source licenses.

  6. that one in the corner Silver badge

    Counterintuitively?

    > we found counterintuitively with Open Compute that by publishing and sharing the architectures and designs that we had for our compute, the industry standardized around it a bit more

    Sorry, Zuck thinks that it would be more intuitive for industry to standardize on something whose architecture & designs are a complete black box to them?

    Okay, it works for Microsoft (they'll change the file format for Word and then not bother to properly document that) but for most things we'd like to know a bit about what we're buying, wouldn't we?

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