The same reason they made Android open source. To look good (Hey we aren’t like the other guys. We support open source!) and to bring in outside ideas, input, and work until they close off every avenue and it’s open in name only.

Cause no one really cares about them and Google doesn’t want to fade into obscurity in this AI race.

Because they love and car…sorry…I threw up in my own mouth there.

Loss leader? Positioning? Mind share? Cock tease? All of the above?

Given that it takes a few million dollars to train a model from scratch, it sure as shit ain’t for love.

So, here’s a hot take - if Google’s core business is advertising, and that machine runs on data and attention, I dunno…maybe the idea is if you can’t beat em, co-opt em, set the de-facto standards and own the “attention”?

Probably because they play the same game as Mark Zuckerberg, the Chinese, to some degree OpenAI… They all release open-weights models.

They’ll generate some hype for their company that way, so it’s advertising. They build good will. They undercut the competition. Or make it clear how they outperform them. Maybe they get some more investor money if they do expand to the local models market. I bet there’s a million reason why it makes sense from a business perspective.

Random suspicion: It is correlated to how much compute US have. That’s the only reason I can think of. I also wondered why they would do that when US tech are grabbing the global hardware. They’d like to keep control of inference in the cloud but are missing power thus lack compute. But they also benefit from a western AI ecosystem that have much more compute available. Pure guess, but maybe something like that ?

“i know what I am doing” has been heard also from the overseer of that nuclear power plant, how was that called? Ah, Chernobyl…