Jul 31, 2024

Nah, Facebook That

Zuckerberg is walking (and talking) a fine line with open vs. closed...

Here we go again. Mark Zuckerberg seems to be exploring how far he can and should push various envelopes with his new chain-wearing persona. Speaking at SIGGRAPH 2024 – you know, the cool, edgy "Premier Conference & Exhibition on Computer Graphics & Interactive Technique" – Zuckerberg did a sit-down with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and he couldn't help himself. Or so he says:

Zuckerberg got excited talking about the open-source AI approach, describing his preference for open models as "selfish" and fueled by a desire to ensure Meta can build the necessary technology the company needs to deliver its social experiences.

"There have just been too many things I've tried to build and told 'nah, you can't really build that' by the platform provider, that at some level I'm just like, 'Nah, fuck that.'" Zuckerberg said Monday. "For the next generation, we're going to build all the way down."

"There goes our broadcast opportunity," Huang joked in response to Zuckerberg's F-bomb.

"Yeah, sorry," Zuckerberg chuckled. "We were doing OK for like 20 minutes, but get me talking about closed platforms, and I get angry."

Oh yes, closed platforms. Like perhaps the ones that made Zuckerberg a billionaire? Those? Last I checked, he's currently making $0 from their "open source" (read: open weight) AI. And while I agree that open source has generally helped Meta in various areas, to suggest that he gets angry about "closed platforms" is just silly – he's built perhaps the largest closed platform in the history of the world!

What he actually gets angry about is not controlling the closed platform in the case of mobile. He more or less admits that earlier in the talk when he acknowledges that Meta's first exploration in open source came about because they were late to various games like the cloud. And he also undercuts his performance on closed vs. open with what he said almost immediately before his anti-Apple rant:

"There will always be open and closed. I'm not a zealot on this," Zuckerberg said on Monday. "Not everything we do is open. But in general, there's a lot of value if the software, especially, is open.

Yeah, okay so I guess he's not so angry after all. That just adds to the vibe I got while watching it: that this was more for show. This "outburst" felt like it was rehearsed? Right down to Huang's nonchalant response. It doesn't come across that way on the page, but in the video it feels that way – almost like Zuckerberg gave him the heads up that "I think I might swear when talking about being beholden to Apple's closed ecosystem if that's okay". You can imagine Huang responding – not exactly the biggest Apple fan himself – "sure, we'll have fun with it." Zuckerberg's response to Huang's response just makes it all feel even more staged. What a weird thing to stage!

The fact that he hit many of the exact same talking points in this chat that he hit in his sit down with Emily Chang a few days ago doesn't help that vibe... I think it's smart to try to brand himself and Meta as the open alternative to their rivals – notably and yes, humorously, OpenAI – but he has to walk a fine line here. Apple, it seems, pushes him over that line constantly.

But if Zuckerberg takes this whole 'open vs. closed' stance too far, he'll seem disingenuous or worse, hypocritical. I'm old enough to remember when this was the approach Google tried to take against Apple in the earlier days of the Android vs. iPhone wars. It started out sounding like a "winning" thing to say, but the reality was far more complicated and nuanced.

What happens if, say, Meta has to (or decides to) shift their stance on the openness of Llama down the road? Such things have a funny way of happening over time...

But let's not read too much into this now (he says after writing about 1,000 words on the topic), this was just sort of a strange chat clearly for co-marketing purposes (Huang at one point notes that Meta has access to something like 600,000 H100s, to which Zuckerberg quips, "we're good customers"). They swapped leather jackets and stories about feeding each other meat. This moment just felt like a guy who thought it would be really cool to swear on stage. You know who else just got some buzz for swearing on stage in a newly un-Earthed talk from... 40 years ago? That's right, that famous co-founder of the company which is now Meta's foil. But Jobs swearing on that stage and in that context feels natural, not like it was rehearsed.