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avaertoday at 12:34 PM14 repliesview on HN

I lament the comments saying this in any way redeems Meta (the company).

The researchers releasing this stuff have almost nothing to do with Meta other than being bankrolled by the slaughterhouse.

You aren't the customer, you are the pawn in big tech's game of thrones. Your good will is a commodity to be traded, almost literally. It will be used against you the moment it's convenient. This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.

But I guess most people just don't care.

I'm glad it's open. It does not make me think any better of Meta.


Replies

ericmaytoday at 1:48 PM

It’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers (which is true, America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on great people). Don’t you know? Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled!

> This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation.

I’ve been told over and over this doesn’t matter. Just needs to be cheap and open. Or maybe that’s only when Chyna is involved?

Sorry this post is a bit snarky but it really is something to behold. And certainly I don’t know the OP’s opinions on Chinese open weight models. Perhaps they agree with me.

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monster_trucktoday at 1:03 PM

Meta can never be redeemed, but it's still valid to admit that FB at one point had a very badass engineering culture.

They're one of 2 companies I would absolutely never work for (weapons etc aside). FB's recruiters hounded me so often I requested that they blackball me. The day they became Meta, I learned this by checking my email to see that they started trying to reach out again. I once again requested that they blackball me. This by extention taints OAI, the other company I'll never work for.

After a few hours with Glimmer I'm pretty impressed. It's better than the benchmark scores seem to indicate compared to Qwen 3.6 27B. I'm very excited for 3.8

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jjicetoday at 1:33 PM

I'd also argue this is the case for any company releasing open weights. They're not righteous, they're marketing. That's not necessarily a bad thing! They're releasing some great stuff for free and we benefit from that. Every company doing this has a motivation to not release these for free.

Alibaba, Google, Moonshot, Thinking Machines, etc are not releasing their models for free because they love to. They want to grab market share. I'll take it.

I still will not use a hosted Meta product, but damn this model looks solid.

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commonertoday at 12:50 PM

Muse Glimmer doesn't redeem Meta, but it's a contribution to the commons and the Apache 2.0 licensing is an improvement from the restricted licenses attached to Llama. If even Meta can use a permissive license for its model weights, so can any other company.

skinfaxitoday at 1:04 PM

How is this non-sequitor the top comment?

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mirekrusintoday at 1:00 PM

There is literally not a single comment like this, the only off topic comment like this is yours.

drob518today at 1:51 PM

If it’s open, do you care so much that it’s from Meta? At least it should be able to give you an honest answer about Tiananmen Square.

armchairhackertoday at 1:25 PM

You can say the same about planet Earth.

captainblandtoday at 12:40 PM

To be honest the main issue with meta has never been around open/closed software. They've also done react, Cassandra and some other bits. But this, like their open weights is like a feather pressing down on the scale compared to things like promoting genocide in Myanmar, enabling Cambridge analytica, creating a huge closed ecosystem which dominate(s/d) local community communication, mandating doxxed communication, trying to replace actual community communication with algorithmic nonsense etc.

keyboredtoday at 1:02 PM

Any retort to do this like “but why would they just openly release this”[1] pretty much answers itself. Public relations.

If a company can spend money to redeem itself then, well, it can (game theoretically or whatever) do whatever it wants in the future and then spend money to wipe the slate clean.

[1] By which I mean: the very act of being prompted to ask such a question, of planting a seed like hmm, Meta might have some aspects which are good for us. You don’t have to be convinced of it. Just the seed itself can pay for itself.

tonyhart7today at 1:30 PM

what makes Meta so bad ???? they just your average billion dollar company

laroditoday at 12:45 PM

Meta and its products, as a whole, is a threat to your kids, your mental health, your community's health and the planet as a whole. It is just sad and very repulsive everyone fell so easily addicted to their social drug. Yes - it is a drug, and it is hard to get off from.

Nothing redeems them at this point of time, they are doing exactly ZERO to redeem. Tossing open weight models (not opensource!!) is not a basis for redemption, and does not constitute remorse in any way. Trying to portray it as such is complicity to META's crimes against humanity.

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darigtoday at 12:37 PM

[dead]

hn_submittoday at 1:23 PM

I can't take any Big Tech company that still uses PHP seriously. Sorry.