If they make AI models free to use it makes OpenAI nearly valueless, which means that they can't survive and then sell Meta's competitors a better GenAI product than Meta can make themselves.
So basically since they don't make money directly on GenAI, it makes sense for them to release it for free so no one else can have something better, so they don't have to compete on GenAI abilities with their competitors.
The angle is that by releasing cutting edge AI research to the public openly, the relative difference between open source models/tech and closed source tech shrinks.
Whether or not you think the "value" of AI products is proportional to their performance gap vs the next closest thing or not is up to you. Very interesting PG essay I read recently talks about the opposite of this (Superlinear returns) where if you're half as good as the next competitor, you don't get half the customers, you get 0.
Windows should always provide enough additional value that makes up for what they are asking as money - compared to the free option. That is the point. If you had no other viable options, then they could do whatever they like. Now they have a baseline to compete with and it is very hard to compete with free.
Mistral makes comparable models to Facebook. Mistral charges money, Facebook does not. This negatively affect’s Mistral’s pricing power because a customer can get 70% of the performance they need for 0% of the cost.
The “0% of the cost” part is unique to software businesses because you can copy software so cheaply
The Llama models have played a large part in fostering the development of the open source LLM ecosystem, and I expect Llama3 to put in performance > mistral medium and anthropic haiku while being fully open and able to be run on consumer hardware.
