[gnat]

Meta’s core business is Facebook and Instagram attention: posts, social graph, ads. It is not generous around those things.

OP’s point was that Meta is being generous with other people’s business value (AI goodies), but not their own (content, graph, ads).

[gorbypark]

I don't think it's really being "generous" with their competitors business value. Meta has a track record of open sourcing the "infrastructure" bits behind their core products. They have released many, many things like React/React Native, GraphQL, Casandra (database), Open Compute Project (server / router designs), HHVM and dozens of other projects long before their recent AI push. Have a look here, I spent five minutes scrolling and got 1/4 of the way through! https://opensource.fb.com/projects/

With Llama, they now have an army of people hacking on the llama architecture, so even if they don't explicitly use any of llama-adjacent projects, there are tons and tons of optimizations and other techniques being discovered. Just making up numbers, but if they spend x billions on interference per year and the open source community comes up with a way to make inference even just a few more percent efficient, the costs of their open source efforts might be a drop in comparison.

For example, Zuck was on the Dwarkesh podcast recently and mentioned that open sourcing OCP (server/rack design) has saved them billions because the industry standardized their designs, driving down the price for them.