[blihp]

They can't since Meta can spend billions on models that they give away and never need to get a direct ROI on it. But don't expect Meta's largess to persist much beyond wiping out the competition. Then their models will probably start to look about as open as Android does today. (either through licensing restrictions or more 'advanced' capabilities being paywalled and/or API-only)

[sangnoir]

> But don't expect Meta's largess to persist much beyond wiping out the competition

I don't quite follow your argument - what exactly is Meta competing for? It doesn't sell access to a hosted models and shows no interest of being involved in the cloud business. My guess is Meta is driven by enabling wider adoption of AI, and their bet is more (AI-generated) content is good for its existing content-hosting-and-ad-selling business, and good for it's aspirational Metaverse business too, should it pan out.

[blihp]

I'm arguing that Meta isn't in this for altruistic reasons. In the short term, they're doing this so Apple/Google can't do to them with AI tech what they've done to them with mobile/browsers. (i.e. Meta doesn't want them owning the stack, and therefore controlling and dictating, who can do what with it) In the longer term: Meta doesn't sell access... yet. Meta shows no interest... yet. You could have said the same thing about Apple and Google 15+ years ago about a great many things. This has all happened before and this will all happen again.