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!

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

new mexico == mexico

Not sure why you’re talking about it doing literally everything for you. I’m sure you can imagine a scenario where it handles annoying things for you and leaves you free to do things you enjoy instead.

Maybe it gets 10 car insurance quotes for you based on 4 models of car you’re considering.

Or figures out which psychologists in some travel distance of you actually take your insurance, are taking new patients, and what availability they have.

I can think of a ton of scenarios where a capable and reliable AI agent could make my life simpler.

I think this is just the flaw in the sales pitch. They want it to be inevitable so they describe as doing everything. That way it will appear more useful to more people. If they presented a realistic view of what is going it wouldn't be as interesting.

The "nested reality" twist was already used by the "13th floor" movie so perhaps they intentionally choose a different direction.

We should consider if my use of the quote was really a hook for talking about the script or a metaphor for something else. I won't spoil it by explaining too much though, let our imaginations run free on this one.

Psalm 135:15-18 is my favorite version of it, the most clear-headed. It reads more as a warning "if you do this, then this will happen" than an unreasonable commandment.

The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.

Don't worry about the scriptures though. It's likely to be just some old thinker pointing out the dangers of technologies of his time. No reason to believe those dangers carry over to today's technologies, probably.