LOL

Late last year, news emerged that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta would be shedding its open source roots to instead work on a closed model like the vast majority of its competitors.

Now we’ve finally gotten a first glimpse of the fruit of its labor: Muse Spark, codenamed Avocado and developed by the company’s unbelievably expensive Superintelligence Labs.

billions and billions of dollars, for the best talent and the best equipment to make the best model.

the company admitted it likely won’t be able to keep up with competing models.

oh.

An executive told Bloomberg that the new model won’t be able to keep up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini.

and tangermann at futurism asks a good question:

…if it can’t keep up with the competition, why release it at all?

since the beginning, zuck has been on a very questionable ai journey.

The company’s decision to train the closed-source model on third-party open-source models, including a Chinese one developed by Alibaba, will also likely raise eyebrows. The practice of “distillation,” or training a “student” model on a more capable “parent” one, has proven controversial in the past.

when you train on ai output, you inherit all of the hallucinations of the parent model as well as introducing new ones in the student model.

and this is following llama’s relative failures and controversies.

Meta’s preceding Llama open source models largely failed to catch on, with a major controversy last year finding that Meta may have faked benchmark results to make its Llama 4 model seem more capable than it actually was.

leading to an exodus from facebook (not calling them meta)

“[Zuck] was really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved in this,”

“And so basically sidelined the entire GenAI organization. A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven’t yet left will leave.”

and he immediately goes on a mad hiring spree following.

maybe i’m way off base here, but with zuck’s behavior lately, do you think he might be a little manic?