Of all the tech companies, Meta is the most ruthless and shameless. You'd have to be a total fool to trust Zuck, especially Zuck who put billions into AR for not much return and now billions into AI to create lackluster lagging models.
Off base when considering the likes of Palantir and many others.
Not a fan of the person or many of Meta's business practices. But Meta has given a lot back with Llama and PyTorch, among many other open source contributions. Which others in the space are not doing.
> Llama [...] among many other open source contributions
Llama is not Open Source. Don't buy Meta's marketing that's trying to dilute the term. Llama is only available under restrictive terms that favor Meta.
Fair point. I cannot amend my original comment but you are correct in that the weights have restrictions which go against the nature of Open Source software.
React made quite a mess of the web just so we couldn't browse with JavaScript disabled, thereby allowing Facebook to track us through those like buttons that popped up everywhere.
Are there hidden barbs in llama and pytorch too? I'm not close enough to them to know.
Not a fan of Facebook or React (though React Native is IMHO the one eyed among the blind for cross platform mobile development), but I think that's a bit far fetched. I do think Facebook has (or had?) genuinely an engineering culture that wants to give something back.
This is true. I've been to several conferences where FB sent engineers to talk about their open source projects or how they used a particular language or framework.
I remember the conflicted feeling of strongly disliking their products and leadership but liking their contributions. Same energy but more intense in both directions many years later.
From my personal experience, yes, but your mileage may vary. I tried to like Flutter multiple times, but can't. Capacitator etc feel fairly hacky. All the other options are comparatively obscure.
It helps that I like React alright. I don't think it's particularly well designed or enjoyable to use, and I hate debugging React code, but it's manageable with good development practices. Same goes for JS/TS. Not great, not terrible.
React is the defacto standard of web development for a reason. That's not the reason you can't browse the web with JS (it would be Angular if it wasn't React or others). And just because you use React, doesn't mean Meta can track you.
Their point was that (i) React becoming the defacto standard played into the hands of Meta, who are interested in tracking people. (ii) Tracking is made easier by running arbitrary JavaScript in the browser. And (iii) before SPAs were big (pre-React), more people used to completely disable JS in their browser.
Not saying I buy this theory. Just trying to explain what I think they were alluding to, as I had the impression you missed it and went in a different direction.
I'm not sure their tech contributions in any way offset the various scandals they've had with data and like, actively targeting teens when it appears they're in a vulnerable state. Who cares about friggin 'open source' Llama when they've done evil stuff like that. Their 'social credit' is way deep in the red, esp with people who have no knowledge of those contributions.
They are incredibly ruthless and shameless in my opinion.
Yes they would? Mega corps can afford to commoditize various layers which prevents competition from accessing any profit. Meanwhile Meta et al can capture that profit in their own layers instead.
Bread and circuses to keep the people happy while they do they shady stuff behind closed doors. This is millenia old. Can't say that as fact but it certainly looks that way when you examine their record.
Remember when they were into swaying elections, giving extra data to Cambridge analytica? Here's more
First, the only model creators ones who have not "given back" in the way you mean, are OpenAI and Anthropic, everyone else has at least some models in the open.
Second, I would argue that it's strange how we are discounting the contribution of OpenAI and Anthropic, because being the first to show that something valuable is possible actually counts for quite a lot in my book. Competition and open-source copies are nice, but the value add attribution in ai labs feels really strange at times.
What Meta has given, so far, are decent copies, which mostly serve their own needs and are making it harder for the above companies (who actually have to generate revenue through AI efforts, because it's all they do) to exist. And that's fine and all, Meta can do what they want to the degree the law permits, but I have a hard time understanding them as the good guys in the AI space, unless I squint very heavily.
I don't think it's a big stretch to say that Meta has not only been more successful than Palantir at mass surveillance, but has also likely caused a greater magnitude of harm (a lot through negligence) when considering events like the genocide in Myanmar.
I'd trust Zuck if I had a signed, airtight agreement for a large amount of money he paid into an escrow account for something I owned or was transferring ownership.
He's very close to peak homo economicus. (EDIT: this next point is wrong, the oral history I heard referred to Winklevoss pops, not Zuckerberg, and I misremembered) Which makes sense, given his father is deep in actuarial services.
I get that people hate Oracle for a variety of reasons, but this is just such a ridiculous assertion. They've been one of the largest tech companies for multiple decades. Do you honestly believe that a majority of their revenue came from legal settlements from suing their own customers, at any time in their history?
Do you have a citation for this claim? I mean if the company is as absurdly litigious as you're saying, it stands to reason that you wouldn't make unsubstantiated claims about them in a public forum, right?
I'd guess it's something to do with Oracle's licensing policies. My understanding is they'd audit businesses who used their software and bill them an additional fee for violations. Maybe it's not strictly legal settlements but it's plausible that they made more money from these fees than from their regular fees at some point and even ongoing today. (That also lines up with jokes I've heard about them hiring more lawyers than software developers given someone's gotta do the audits.)
No, I do not believe it is even remotely plausible that they have ever made a majority of their revenue from licensing violation fees, especially today, when their total annual revenue is over $57 billion.
Oracle is an enormous company. I'm in my 40s, and literally every non-startup I've worked for in my career has been an Oracle customer, across multiple product lines. They're a 48-year-old company with more than 150,000 employees.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not expressing an opinion here on Oracle or its licensing and auditing practices. I'm just responding to the wild claims about revenue from lawsuits or license violations. Oracle stock has been publicly-traded for nearly four decades, so there's plenty of data available from their earnings statements. If these claims were even remotely based in reality, it would be easy to cite a source.
Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.
Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.
Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.
OK, but that anecdote is orthogonal to your original claim. No mention of a lawsuit or actually having to pay extra fees. And "rogue installs" essentially means "using copyrighted software in a quantity that exceeds what we actually paid for", i.e. theft.
> No mention of ... actually having to pay extra fees.
> If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine.
I don’t think you read that correctly. To use an analogy, it’s similar to Costco requiring me to pay again for every item in my cart because I forgot to ring up a carton of eggs when I went through self-checkout. Maybe you don’t call that “extra” but I think most people would.
No, I read it correctly, did you? They didn't say they ultimately had to pay any of those fees, just that the violation fees were dangled as a threat. They explicitly said "there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs" which strongly implies they did not actually pay any of those extra violation fees, because they rooted out those license violations before being charged!
So $0 contribution to Oracle's revenue from fees in that anecdote, was my point. (The key word there in my comment was "actually", as in actually paying the fees, whereas you focused on the word "extra" instead. I don't debate that if the fees were actually paid, then yes that is quite obviously an extra fee.)
My original assertion was just that Meta is unlikely to be 'the most ruthless and shameless [of all the tech companies].' There's so much competition out there for that title.
But also for a long time the best available open-weights models on the market - this investment has done a lot to kickstart open AI research, which I am grateful for no matter the reasons.
> especially Zuck who put billions into AR for not much return
While, it's indisputable about the current state of AR/VR. Zuck has a large exetensial risk to Microsoft/Apple/Google. If those companies want to revoke access to Meta's apps (ex [1]) they can and Zuck is in trouble. At one point Google was trying to compete with FaceBook with Google+ and while that didn't work, it's still a large business risk.
Putting billions into trying to get a moat for your product seems like prudent business sense when you're raking in hundreds of billions.
