[splwjs]

I sell widgets. I promise the incalculable power of widgets has yet to be unleashed on the world, but it is tremendous and awesome and we should all be very afraid of widgets taking over the world because I can't see how they won't.

Anyway here's the sales page. the widget subscription is so premium you won't even miss the subscription fee.

[_uhtu]

This. It's really weird the way we suddenly live in a world where it's the norm to take whatever a tech company says about future products at face value. This is the same world where Tesla promised "zero intervention LA to NYC self driving" by the end of the year in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The same world where we know for a fact that multiple GenAI demos by multiple companies were just completely faked.

It's weird. In the late 2010s it seems like people were wising up to the idea that you can't implicitly trust big tech companies, even if they have nap pods in the office and have their first day employees wear funny hats. Then ChatGPT lands and everyone is back to fully trusting these companies when they say they are mere months from turning the world upside down with their AI, which they say every month for the last 12-24 months.

[cle]

I'm not sure anyone is asking you to take it at face value or implicitly trust them? There's a 92-page paper with details: https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-o...

[hnfong]

> In the late 2010s it seems like people were wising up to the idea that you can't implicitly trust big tech companies

In the 2000s we only had Microsoft, and none of us were confused as to whether to trust Bill Gates or not...

[mikae1]

Nobody tells it like Zitron:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/

> What makes this interview – and really, this paper — so remarkable is how thoroughly and aggressively it attacks every bit of marketing collateral the AI movement has. Acemoglu specifically questions the belief that AI models will simply get more powerful as we throw more data and GPU capacity at them, and specifically ask a question: what does it mean to "double AI's capabilities"? How does that actually make something like, say, a customer service rep better? And this is a specific problem with the AI fantasists' spiel. They heavily rely on the idea that not only will these large language models (LLMs) get more powerful, but that getting more powerful will somehow grant it the power to do...something. As Acemoglu says, "what does it mean to double AI's capabilities?"

[MrScruff]

I don't think claiming that pure scaling of LLMs isn't going to lead to AGI is a particularly hot take. Or that current LLMs don't provide a whole lot of economic value. Obviously, if you were running a research lab you'd be trying a bunch of different things, including pure scaling. It would be weird not to. I don't know if we're going to hit actual AGI in the next decade, but given the progress of the last less-than-decade I don't see why anyone would rule it out. That in itself seems pretty remarkable, and it's not hard to see where the hype is coming from.

[RhodesianHunter]

Meta just keeps releasing their models as open-source, so that whole line of thinking breaks down quickly.

[threecheese]

That line of thinking would not have reached the conclusion that you imply, which is that open source == pure altruism. Having the benefit of hindsight, it’s very difficult for me to believe that. Who knows though!

I’m about Zucks age, and have been following his career/impact since college; it’s been roughly a cosine graph of doing good or evil over time :) I think we’re at 2pi by now, and if you are correct maybe it hockey-sticks up and to the right. I hope so.

[RhodesianHunter]

I don't think this is a matter of good or evil, simply a matter of business strategy.

If LLMs end up being the platform of the future, Zuck doesn't want OpenAI/Microsoft to be able to monopolize it.

[ctoth]

Wouldn't the equivalent for Meta actually be something like:

> Other companies sell widgets. We have a bunch of widget-making machines and so we released a whole bunch of free widgets. We noticed that the widgets got better the more we made and expect widgets to become even better in future. Anyway here's the free download.

Given that Meta isn't actually selling their models?

Your response might make sense if it were to something OpenAI or Anthropic said, but as is I can't say I follow the analogy.

[mattnewton]

that would make sense if it was from Openai, but Meta doesn't actually sell these widgets? They release the widget machines for free in the hopes that other people will build a widget ecosystem around them to rival the closed widget ecosystem that threatens to lock them out of a potential "next platform" powered by widgets.

[camel_Snake]

Meta doesn't sell widgets in this scenario - they give them away for free. Their competition sells widgets, so Meta would be perfectly happy if the widget market totally collapsed.

[sqeaky]

That is strong (and fun) point, but this is peer reviewable and has more open collaboration elements than purely selling widgets.

We should still be skeptical because often want to claim to be better or have unearned answers, but I don't think the motive to lie is quite as strong as a salesman's.

[troupo]

> this is peer reviewable

It's not peer-reviewable in any shape or form.

[sqeaky]

Others can build models that try to have decent performance with a lower number of parameters. If they match what is in the paper that is the crudest form of review, but Mistral is releasing some models (this one?) so this can get more nuanced if needs.

That said, doing that is slow and people will need to make decisions before that is done.

[troupo]

So, the best you can do is "the crudest form of review"?

[hnfong]

It is kind of "peer-reviewable" in the "Elon Musk vs Yann LeCun" form, but I doubt that the original commenter meant this.

[littlestymaar]

Except: Meta doesn't sell AI at all. Zuck is just doing this for two reasons:

- flex

- deal a blow to Altmann

[HDThoreaun]

Meta uses ai in all the recommendation algorithms. They absolutely hope to turn their chat assistants into a product on WhatsApp too, and GenAI is crucial to creating the metaverse. This isn’t just a charity case.

[littlestymaar]

AI isn't a single thing: of course meta didn't buy thousands of GPUs for fun.

But it has nothing to do with LLMs (and interestingly enough they aren't opening their recommendation tech).

[PodgieTar]

There are literal ads for Meta Ai on television. The idea they’re not selling something is absurd.

[ThrowawayTestr]

If OpenAI was saying this you'd have a point but I wouldn't call Facebook a widget seller in this case when they're giving their widgets away for free.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

But Meta isn't selling it