I just want to express how grateful I am that Zuck and Yann and the rest of the Meta team have adopted an open approach and are sharing the model weights, the tokenizer, information about the training data, etc. They, more than anyone else, are responsible for the explosion of open research and improvement that has happened with things like llama.cpp that now allow you to run quite decent models locally on consumer hardware in a way that you can avoid any censorship or controls.

Not that I even want to make inference requests that would run afoul of the controls put in place by OpenAI and Anthropic (I mostly use it for coding stuff), but I hate the idea of this powerful technology being behind walls and having gate-keepers controlling how you can use it.

Obviously, there are plenty of people and companies out there that also believe in the open approach. But they don't have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and billions in sustainable annual cash flow and literally ten(s) of billions of dollars worth of GPUs! So it's a lot more impactful when they do it. And it basically sets the ground rules for everyone else, so that Mistral now also feels compelled to release model weights for most of their models.

Anyway, Zuck didn't have to go this way. If Facebook were run by "professional" outside managers of the HBS/McKinsey ilk, I think it's quite unlikely that they would be this open with everything, especially after investing so much capital and energy into it. But I am very grateful that they are, and think we all benefit hugely from not only their willingness to be open and share, but also to not use pessimistic AI "doomerism" as an excuse to hide the crown jewels and put it behind a centralized API with a gatekeeper because of "AI safety risks." Thanks Zuck!