Mark Zuckerberg writes about Llama 3.1 in a Threads post using images of text instead of a blog. He makes a point that he’s mentioned in recent interviews too, about not wanting to be locked in by platform vendors like Apple:
One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in Al and AR/VR for the next generation of computing.
I certainly have my gripes about Meta — I don’t like ad-supported services and I still partially blame Facebook for exacerbating societal and political problems — but I do respect that Mark is good at his job. He’s uniquely technical compared to most CEOs. He’s the only founder left running his own company at the scale of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Today’s release of Llama 3.1 and Mark’s general pitch about AI seems pretty good.
What would the world look like if he led a different company, one focused only on paid products and not ads? We’ll never know, but I sometimes wonder about it.
