Meta’s Giving Away AI Free.. .But Not What You Think Why
Meta’s Giving Away AI Free.. .But Not What You Think Why
The folks at Facebook really do have some killer moves. They may not be doing a great job of launching new products (all successful new Meta launches were actually takeovers of existing products), but they are surely good at protecting their turf.
So they are hitting out at Google and Microsoft massively and it’s hurting.
Why? Are you thinking? Facebook is not in search, and MS isn’t their best competition either. So why are they trying to do this, and how?
It’s all about AI.
Both Google and Microsoft have taken similar routes to AI. Closed source, massive systems that people can access but can’t own. They’ve spent millions of dollars on AI and they want their due.
Meta has done a 180. It is spending millions of dollars on AI and giving all of it away for free.
Yes, its best model, LLama, is open source. The latest Llama release is LLama3, which makes GPT4 cry but you don’t have to pay for it.
What Facebook wants to do is make generative AI so commonplace and so doable that smaller companies with paper-thin budgets can use their readymade models and research to come up with technologies and implementations that make Google & Microsoft irrelevant.
AI is the next big frontier and Google can’t defend search against it. Its only chance is to rule AI like it rules search.
For Microsoft the stakes are just as high. They need to dominate AI after investing over $10 billion in OpenAI. It better work!
Zuckerberg is giving them nightmares but making it free. He doesn’t care because AI has no significant impact on his business. People will still hang out on Instagram and watch reels.
Smart? There are second-order and third-order effects. AI is still very new. Let’s see if this pays off big or backfires.
What do you think? Let me know!
Cheers!
Your best friend in the business
Cyril Gupta
Of Teknikforce
