The Puzzling Zuckerberg

Photo - The Puzzling Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg isn’t a widely understood figure – but this characteristic doesn’t always do him a bad favor.
This time the story concerns Mark Zuckerberg’s LLaMA and its family of generative AI software.

In spite of placing a strong emphasis on the development of the metaverse, it seems like Zuckerberg is currently more interested in its development. He sees  LLaMA as the potential digital scaffolding supporting the next generation of AI apps.

This new focus has been apparently felt by others. Joseph Spisak, who joined the company as director of product development for generative AI, told CNBC, “Don’t tell Mark, but it feels less mixed reality and more AI these days. It kind of feels like an AI conference, which is kind of in my wheelhouse.”

Yet, while LLaMA seems to strike a chord with the community given that it’s open-source and does not follow the traditional software license and subscription models, the same doesn’t fully hold for Wall Street because such a business model makes it difficult for Wall Street to value it.

It is likewise complex for the investors to understand it – but it does not seem to put Zuckerberg off.

On the contrary, he announced the launch of LLaMA 2, which, according to Zuckerberg, isn’t slated to generate “a large amount of revenue in the near term, but over the long term, hopefully that can be something.”

Though this version will likely have a commercial license that allows companies to integrate it into their products and does earn some money from cloud-computing companies like Microsoft and Amazon, it has added that it isn’t focused on monetizing LLaMA 2 directly. 

Naturally, even this Zuckerberg’s isn’t fully controversy-free. Some in the industry consider Meta’s licensing agreement to use Llama 2 as a way for the company to reap all the benefits. This is because third-party developers must request approval from Meta to use Llama 2 if they incorporate the software into any products or services that had “greater than 700 million monthly active users” in the month prior to its July release. 

Previously, GN Crypto shed light on Zuckerberg’s metaverse interview.