Mark Zuckerberg: prediction

Transcript context

…If it turns out that other models are also really good. There’s a bunch of good open-source models. So that part of your mission is fulfilled, and maybe other models are better at coding. Is there a world where you just say, "Look, the open-source ecosystem is healthy. There’s plenty of competition. We're happy to just use some other model, whether it's for internal software engineering at Meta or deploying to our apps. We don't necessarily need to build with Llama"? Again, we do a lot of things. Let's take a step back. The reason why we're building our own big models is because we want to be able to build exactly what we want. None of the other models in the world are exactly what we want. If they're open source, you can take them and fine-tune them in different ways. But you still have to deal with the model architectures. And they make different size tradeoffs that affect latency and inference cost. At the scale that we operate at, that stuff really matters. We made the Llama Scout and Maverick models certain sizes for a specific reason. They fit on a host and we wanted certain latency — especially for the voice models that we’re working on — that we want to pervade everything we're doing from the glasses to all of our apps to the Meta AI app and all that stuff. There's a level of control of your own destiny that you only get when you build the stuff yourself. That said, AI is going to be used in every single thing that every company does. When we build a big model, we also have to choose which internal use cases we're going to optimize for. So does that mean for certain things we might say, "Okay, maybe Claude is better for building this specific development tool that this team is using”? All right, cool then use that. Great. We don’t want to fight with one hand tied behind our back. We’re doing a lot of different stuff. You also asked, would it not be important anymore because other people are doing open source? On this, I'm a little more worried. You have to ask yourself this. For anyone who shows up now and is doing open source — now that we have done it — would they still be doing open source if we weren’t doing it? I think there are a handful of folks who see the trend that more and more development is going toward open source, and they're like, "Oh crap, we need to be on this train or else we’re going to lose." If you have a closed-model API and increasingly a lot of developers don't want that. So you’re seeing a bunch of other players start to do some work in open source. But it's unclear if it's dabbling, or fundamental for them the way that it has been for us. A good example is what's going on with Android. Android started off as the open-source thing. There's not really any open-source alternative. Over time, Android has just gotten more and more closed. So if you're us, you need to worry that if we stop pushing the industry in this direction, all these other people… Maybe they’re only really doing it because they're trying to compete with us and the direction we’re pushing things. They already showed their revealed preference for what they would do if open source didn’t exist. And it wasn’t open source. We just need to be careful about relying on that continued behavior for the future of the technology that we're going to build at the company. Another thing I've heard you mention is that it's important that the standard gets built around American models like Llama. I wanted to understand your logic there. With certain kinds of networks, it is the case that the Apple App Store just has a big contingency around what it's built around. But it doesn't seem like if you built some sort of scaffold for DeepSeek, you couldn't have easily just switched it over to Llama 4, especially since between generations. Llama 3 wasn't MoE and Llama 4 is. So things are changing between generations of models as well. What’s the reason for thinking things will get built out in this contingent way on a specific standard?…

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