The article's title is terrible. The article itself seems to have all the right pieces but connects them in weird ways.
Big tech wants to make AI cost nothing to end-users maybe, but Google and Microsoft want the cost of hosting AI to make your eyes bleed so you don't compete or trim any profits off their cloud services. As the article points out Facebook does not offer cloud services so its interests in this case align with mom and pop shops that don't want to be dependent on big tech for AI.
But Mistral was way more useful to mom and pop shops when they were trying to eke out performance from self-hostable small models. Microsoft took them out of that game. These enormous models may help out boutique data center companies to compete with big tech's cloud offerings but it's beyond a small dev shop who wants to run a co-pilot on a couple of servers.
Microsoft and Google don't want you to learn that a 7B model can come close to a model 50x-100x its size. We don't know that's even possible, you say? That's right we don't know, but they don't even want you to try and find out if it's possible or not. Such is the threat to their cloud offerings.
If they did Microsoft would have made a much bigger deal of things like their Orca-math model and would have left Mistral well alone.
The title "Why big companies like Meta want to commoditize open source and open weight models to increase demand for their complimentary services" did not quite have the same ring to it to be quite honest
The Gemma of Clement Farabet the French-American student of Meta's French-American LeCunn? I wouldn't be surprised if they share an ideological affinity. The big players allow some breathing space for the top brass so they don't walk. Look at the timing of Andrej Karpathy departure from OpenAI. I'm sure he might give a lot of different public answers, but it just so happened that it coincided when the oxygen started getting a little stale around there. [0]
This is the forest for the trees situation. The correct analogy is Chrome and ad blockers. Google didn't tighten the screws until the bean counters started saying it was starting to bite.
But only until. Facebook rugpulled even React, a (once in the past) javascript library. I can't wait to see what they will pull out when they become the AI overlord.
Not "take them out", I said they took them out of the small model game. They did that by giving Mistral free compute, so Mistral turned its main focus to large models. Their announcement after the Microsoft deal was literally "Mistral Large".
Big tech wants to make AI cost nothing to end-users maybe, but Google and Microsoft want the cost of hosting AI to make your eyes bleed so you don't compete or trim any profits off their cloud services. As the article points out Facebook does not offer cloud services so its interests in this case align with mom and pop shops that don't want to be dependent on big tech for AI.
But Mistral was way more useful to mom and pop shops when they were trying to eke out performance from self-hostable small models. Microsoft took them out of that game. These enormous models may help out boutique data center companies to compete with big tech's cloud offerings but it's beyond a small dev shop who wants to run a co-pilot on a couple of servers.
Microsoft and Google don't want you to learn that a 7B model can come close to a model 50x-100x its size. We don't know that's even possible, you say? That's right we don't know, but they don't even want you to try and find out if it's possible or not. Such is the threat to their cloud offerings.
If they did Microsoft would have made a much bigger deal of things like their Orca-math model and would have left Mistral well alone.