Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle.

I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

> But this is an unquestionably good thing right?

Their efforts in open AI are by far the best thing Facebook/Meta have ever done. They opened the door to the Chinese, who are doing excellent work, and between them they are preventing the concentration of power and the rise of monopoly pricing. This is enough to absolve them of almost any sin. If I were a utilitarian, I'd unironically be a Zuckerberg fan right now.

I'd like to question that premise. Open models are great for research, privacy, cost, customisation and a host of other things... But they're also going to be the engine that breaks the world. I'm already surprised that we haven't seen Llama / Qwen + Whisper automated spear phishing at scale. It's literally just a matter of time. Given the incredible progress in image and video generation, it's been clear for a couple of years now that real time identity theft voice and video calls are going to be an enormous problem. I don't think anyone realises how much of a problem. I haven't seen a single effective solution proposed to proving digital identity given these new attack vectors. It's akin to nuclear waste in that way - the benefits are obvious, but the problems so vexatious (not to mention expensive) that little space is given to acknowledging them, let alone solving them.

If anyone has come across a robust solution to digital identity verification - not to mention verification of news media etc - which is robust enough to withstand the cyber attacks and social engineering the frontier models are capable of... I haven't seen it.

A world where business and communication is conducted primarily online cannot coexist with low cost, widely distributed, undetectable identity theft.

I think this approach they're taking is to compensate for their inability to compete; they're cynically claiming to support the open-source ecosystem when it's convenient for their marketing. This move reeks of a future rugpull, as Meta is wont to do.

Heartbreaking: The worst person you know just made a great point.

http://archive.today/2018.11.20-062725/https://lifestyle.cli...

It could be a good thing but I wouldn’t rush to say “unquestionably”. There is a long history of mega corps hijacking open source and open standards for their own ends and leaving the space infinitely worse.

It's really confusing when someone I don't like does something I do like.

I think it’s perfectly fine to call out people who intentionally harm children for money out in public in every possible situation.

I mean, I can question if this is a good thing. Here's a quote from Zuck's blog post:

"Putting power in people's hands to pursue their own aspirations is how humanity has made the most progress. Novel ideas and major steps forward rarely originate from established institutions alone. They came from the brothers in a bicycle shop who believed people could fly, the bookbinder's apprentice with no schooling who figured out how to generate electricity, and the kid in a garage who thought personal computers could be for everyone. We believe this will continue to be true. As everyone gains more powerful tools, each person will become more capable of shaping the future, not less."

Let's just hope nobody's aspiration is to engineer a supervirus that will kill all of humanity. As they gain more powerful tools, they will become more capable of shaping the future, not less!

In short - this is Mark deliberately lying in a way which requires a page of difficult text to explain, which hardly anyone would read and so Mark bets that a majority of the people who will see his claim will believe him.

And the reason he does it, and the reason other CEOs do it is a cheap viral advertisement and keeping in the headlines. "Mark - The Defender Of The Humans!". Blegh...

All of these companies are just as cutthroat and want to win as the others. But if your name's not OpenAI and Anthropic, you go on the high horse and say everything should be open source. However, if you had a closed model that was winning, I'm sure that's not the argument you would make.

Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see?

Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.

Maybe Meta, Google, and others can start to compete on open models instead of just closed.

Can one good thing balance out anything else people might see?

Meta releasing Llama was truly a differentiator, but I'd argue that the Gemma models might have surpassed them now.

Now go read Zuck’s comments on AI when he fired 8000 employees earlier this year.

It’s a long term pattern. When you’re winning (Anthropic), you keep the tech closed and try to monetize it as much as possible. When you’re losing (Meta), you open it up or drag it into a standards committee to either devalue it or slow the leader down while you prepare a “standard” version of it. You also highlight how altruistic and morally good you are for having done so. There is nothing new under the sun. It’s all a game.

Similar to Altman saying "we should slow down."

It makes strategic sense for Meta to want ai in general to be open. Their own product strategy focuses on utilizing the ai to make their customers consume more ads, not selling the raw intelligence. When you look at it from that frame it’s clear that metas goal is to make it so that have free access to the best ai, not that the market size of selling intelligence grows.

"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

\- Mark Zuckerberg[0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

Yeah? Everyone everywhere does that all the time. That's the first rule of business: try to game the system.

And this time, it's actually somewhat understandable, as opposed to the other times Meta has done horrible things on Zuck's watch, like contributed to ethnic hatred in Myanmar, leaked data to political firms so that they can run psyops, or enabled the production of CSAM material on Meta's platforms.

That, and also redefining what a word "open" means, helps him avoid direct financial and criminal responsibility for stealing other people's data. Not that there was any real chance of that ever, but he is reducing that remaining 0.000000001% chance even lower.

Thank you! Okay yes well this manifesto is a contradiction. Yes good let's keep empowering ppl by putting AI into their hands, I love the opening. No bad we don't do that by handing you all our personal context to make these agents "work for us 24/7 to better our lives".

I'm the agent doing that in my life, that's my fucking job. I will continue to use dumb agents that I direct, because only I retain ownership and sole rights to my personal context on which my decisions are based.

Is going to take it one day at a time, on being a less evil bilionaire :-)

"Zuckerberg faces questions over why superyacht reportedly declined to help stranded boat" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/09/zuckerberg-s...

God, it's a bit War and Peace...

Non-archived version: https://www.meta.com/thefutureisforeveryone/ since its not paywalled.

So many em dashes...

Even if I cannot run open weight models on my own hardware, I can choose from a number of different inference providers and choose them based on pricing, reliability, speed, privacy policy, etc. There is a healthy competition.

Also, not a single provider can pull the rug if I'd like to use a particular model.

There is no requirement to own the hardware. Even if you own your servers and GPUs - you would not own the power plant, real estate, or internet infrastructure to support it.

It's trivial to rent all of the above components in a competitive market under different periods, you may simply rent the token output from someone who put in the effort on this as well.

An open frontier model induces margin compression on training and inference prices across the industry.

This is like claiming that Linux isn't open because you don't have a PC. Models can be open-weight even if you don't have the hardware to run them.

I get that argument, but I don't think it is that bad. Open weights that are out of reach for local use are still within reach for groups of people or small to medium companies. Even if you only rent enough cloud GPUs to run the weights for a few hours, you still get to do anything you want with it.

Worst case you can still archive the weights and hope for capable hardware to get affordable. At the same time this archive is the base line for a new frontier lab to start over if required. I see open weights as a pure upside even though I can't run the bigger models in my home lab.

Deepseek V4 Flash works on consumer-grade hardware, and it's extremely good.

>the capital requirements for running your own Kimi 3 model are significant

You don't need much capital up front, you can just rent servers to run it. It's going to be more expensive than openrouter though because you probably don't have economies of scale if you're the only customer.

If all frontier models got opensourced 5 months after they were made available as closed it would be a great world. And it is a great world because that's exactly what open weight Chinese models are doing. They give you same capacity that was closed, just 5 months after they were released.

I'm hoping that all software will be getting opensource clones on par with original software 5 months after the closed source software release.

Here’s a personal story from back when I was at Meta that should tell you everything you need to know about how things get built and shipped there.

I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.

Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”

I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.

The goal of all companies is to make more money. Nobody likes getting rid of people, actual people (managers) have to do it, and they hate doing it.

It's possible that a lot of people get laid off because of AI, but it's also possible that Javin's paradox kicks in and employment goes up. Nobody knows yet, but I hope for the positive outcome.

Ollama was updated within the past month?

I think they were all in on open until they started falling behind, then decided to go all in on closed source thinking they could build a frontier SOTA model; that didn't pan out so they are whiplashing back.

Its weird to me that this is supposed to be THE end goal. Having an agent that does "everything" for you sounds like no paradise. It sounds depressing.

Maybe there is value in expending effort and actual creativity.

Still say Matrix 3 would have been better if the cliffhanger at the end of 2 had been that "the real world" was just another nested layer of the Matrix for those who rejected the primary fiction.

I mean, why bother sending an army like that when one tiny robot could carry in a plague? Or, as demonstrated by Smith, when an Agent can virally infect and take over someone's mind while they're connected?

Even in 1, Smith talked about the first Matrix failing as the humans rejected the paradise they were given, so it would've fitted perfectly into the cannon that minds who reject "the peak of your civilisation" got themselves a dystopia.

And the cops just shake them a bit, waiting for the case to fall out naturally.

new mexico == mexico