It's rare for open source to catch up or beat proprietary quality so early in a cycle.

That's why I think it's so incredibly optimistic that Llama 3.1 405B, an open-weight model, is so good.

No matter what happens from here, we have a world-scale intuition model that allows derivative models to be created from it.

Just an amazing gift for society.

A toehold, a foundation, that the overall ecosystem can use to reach ever farther, that can't be taken away.

Why did the open system win so early this time?

Typically open systems take a long time to catch up because the swarm can't coordinate, and you need to wait for the overall quality to become commodity

And also wait for knowhow about how to create that quality to diffuse out of the companies, as employees naturally leave the leading companies and bring that knowhow with them.

It's often hard for large players to make the case to their shareholders to do an open approach: it's a two-ply (or more) argument, and those are hard to make at scale.

But in this case, Mark Zuckerberg had the capital and leverage to just… do it.

Zuckerberg is a powerful, well-regarded founder who still directs the resources of his company. So he could just do it without having to ask anyone's permission.

And he's savvy enough to know that open source can simultaneously be a move to trip up your competitors and be a massive positive donation to society that will make you beloved by everyone but your competitors.