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by gorbypark 789 days ago
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.