[digitaltrees]

Yes. Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition. Facebook was behind. Grok was behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad they are doing it, I personally use open source models. In part to not spend money on the other APIs. So it’s clear that some percentage of what would be paying uses choose to not pay. The other part of opensource is free community labor. How much development work did Facebook get for free around the core infrastructure of react by open sourcing it? A massive amount that they did pay for but benefit from.

The point is, it may benefit society, and yet that social benefit wasn’t the motive for them releasing it as open source.

[devmor]

I don’t think the motive matters to a large extent if the effect is good.

[galaxyLogic]

Motive probabaly doesn't matter in the end, outcome does. But understanding the motive is a good thing.