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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   37315 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Facebook (Meta) is probably the single greatest facilitator and promoter of open-source AI at the moment:

  • The vast majority of AI researchers use pytorch, a library created and maintained by Meta.
  • Open source LLMs only got any traction because Facebook released their LLAMA model with an insanely permissive license and wrote llama.cpp to efficiently run local LLMs on private user's GPUs.
  • Huge amounts of modern AI is built on top of foundational models trained by Meta, especially the Segment Anything Model (SAM) which not only pioneered foundation models for image tasks but is also used to do data-labelling for everybody else's fine-tuning workflows, meaning that you can make a working computer vision AI in days where it used to take weeks.

Not to mention that Meta remains the only people to have built affordable, easy-to-use VR headsets and market them to casual hobbyists rather than high-level prosumers.

I was down on Meta for the same reasons as you, but in the last five years they've really knocked it out of the park. Right now they're the only FAANG I'd happily work for.

llama.cpp was written by a solo developer from Bulgaria, not Meta (and not even funded/supported by it as far as I know, though they did have the grace to not bring a trademark lawsuit or anything so far).

Thanks for the correction, I thought he was an employee. Bloody well should be by now. Absolute legend.

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