[haxiel]

A previous post here on HN [1] discussed the leak of the original LLaMA model and Stable Diffusion. The article points out that the open-source community's effort resulted in more innovation, and an ecosystem built up around these models leading to rapid adoption. That gives more control to the original authors of the model against their competitors. I think Meta has recognized this and wants to keep their lead going.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

[nwoli]

They’re also already giving out millions of dollars in man hours in releasing and maintaining open source software, as well as lots of other much less used ML models. So they have an existing open source strategy and it makes sense to double down on this one since it’s clearly more impactful than a lot of the other ones

[jiggawatts]

They’re end-users of AI, they’re not vendors selling AI. Giving it away for free is not a loss to them.