Inside Meta’s Pivot From Open Source to Money-Making AI Model | Some Meta employees were directed by leadership to stop talking publicly about open-source while the company recalibrated whether those efforts still made sense moving forward.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/inside-meta-s-pivot-from-open-source-to-money-making-ai-model
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“Meta’s strategy shifted dramatically earlier this year after the company released Llama 4, an open-source model that disappointed Silicon Valley and Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive officer. He sidelined some of the people who worked on that project and personally recruited top AI researchers and leaders, in some cases offering them hundreds of millions of dollars in multiyear pay packages.
The model after Llama 4 had the internal code name Behemoth — but Zuckerberg was disappointed in its direction and scrapped it in pursuit of something new, the people said. Meanwhile, Meta has de-prioritized its open-source strategy.
… The group’s stated goal is to achieve “superintelligence,” which broadly refers to AI systems capable of completing tasks better than humans.
In the US, some high-profile AI academics and other technologists, including Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd.’s Richard Branson, have gone so far as to [encourage a ban on developing “superintelligence”](https://archive.ph/o/c8yb7/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/800-petition-signatures-apple-steve-wozniak-and-virgin-richard-branson-superintelligence-race.html) until more is done to prove it can be built safely.”
Any decision Zuckerberg makes is one of laziness and maximum profit. He’s not a visionary nor is he a forward thinker. Nobody is more of a trend follower than Zuckerberg. He doesn’t do original ideas because they fail.
I doubt Suckerborg has any clear idea of what he wants AI to do. All he knows is, in order to keep up with the cool kids, he has to stay in the race.
Llama was NEVER OPEN SOURCE, it does not provide all the source to study and recreate the model (code, weights, data). There are true open source (open data) models available.
Zuck seems to be the most bumbling, incompetent leader among the centibillionare set. It’s all incompetent fits, starts, ends, and pivots funded by social-media revenue from FB boomers. He’s burned more money on fire (metaverse, open-source AI, devices) than an addled coke addict at a casino.
Such a lousy idea long term. While short term you can certainly make money with Proprietary Models, the market share you can earn from a good Open Source one is huge. If it wasn’t to the Meta verse shit Facebook would have money to burn in making an Open Source LLM and making it the standard Accross the industry. Now it seems CHINA will get there first.
It is more than an open question, namely if ai will ever be generally profitable enough to have justified this level of investment and hype. Or if hardly anything could ever be.