| Don't entirely disagree but I think "mad" is an unfair characterization and simplifies how the fascinating competitive dynamics have played out that resulted in the Llama models. Meta as well as Amazon and MS have been strategically constrained by not owning the mobile platform and they've been pretty consistently clear about that. https://x.com/ianand/status/1753425306181116394 Like it or not, Apple's ATT move (i.e. "Ask App Not to Track") hit their revenue in real dollars and stock price significantly. Not only that, the ensuing chaos helped pave an opening for the rise of competitor TikTok: > Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said that one setting alone cost the company an estimated $10 billion. Its stock value has plunged 70% this year. But ATT had another side effect, one that got far less attention than Meta’s troubles. Apple’s iPhone privacy setting gave TikTok a significant leg up in its fight for social media dominance. (from https://gizmodo.com/how-apple-s-ask-app-not-to-track-prompt-...) Their savior to improve monetization in the face of ATT turned out to be AI: > Further integration of AI helped drive Meta’s first revenue increase in three quarters, the company said on Wednesday. Reels monetization is up over 30% on Instagram and over 40% on Facebook on a quarterly basis as AI plays a larger role in the platforms. (from https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-says-ai-boost...) So improving Reels monetization and competing with TikTok is what led Zuck to seemingly clairvoyantly purchase all those GPUs at the right time to be able to build and release Llama: > We got into this position with Reels where we needed more GPUs to train the models...we were constrained on the infrastructure in catching up to what TikTok was doing as quickly as we wanted to. I basically looked at that and I was like “hey, we have to make sure that we're never in this situation again. So let's order enough GPUs to do what we need to do on Reels and ranking content and feed. But let's also double that.” (from https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/mark-zuckerberg) |