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by michaelt
789 days ago
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I agree that LLMs are not a complement - Facebook is not an organisation that desparately needs a bunch of LLM-generated content. They have masses of content generated for free by users and journalists and influencers and so on - if anything, a bunch of LLM spam is a threat to that. However, Open-weights LLMs are a much smaller threat to Facebook than they are to Google (where it could replace a lot of search usage) or Open AI (whose business is selling LLM access) Perhaps for Facebook the benefits of the open weights approach - where you give away the model and get back a load of somewhat improved models, a faster way of running it, and a load of experienced potential hires - pays off because it doesn't threaten their core business. |
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This is an overly narrow view of what an LLM can do. Generating text is the really neat parlor trick that people are trying to cram in to every possible startup, but if you take a broader view then what LLMs really are is the single largest breakthrough in natural language understanding.
Facebook doesn't need text generators, but they do need language understanding, especially for recommendation and moderation.
I'm not convinced that it's a complement—Joel's explanation is that you make a product that users consume alongside yours very cheap in order to keep people coming to you— but they definitely need LLMs.