To a certain extent, I think it's just IBM disease. A company the size of Meta is expected to have an AI research department like Microsoft or Google, even if their core business (social media) derives relatively less benefit from the technology.
Pretend you're an uncreative PM on an AI team; what part of Facebook or VR could you feasibly improve by iterating on LLMs? Perhaps the content moderation system... but that would require wrangling with the company ethics comittee and someone else at the company probably already took ownership that idea. You've gotta do something compelling or else your ML engineers are going to run off somewhere else.
If I were to ask my ML engineers about what they wanted to work on, they're going to avoid areas where their model is outgunned (i.e.: chat) and instead prefer lower hanging fruit which generalizes well on a resume (i.e.: "Pioneered and published key innovations in LLM code-generation").
Of course, the alternative answer is that Meta wants to replace all of their jr. developers with GPUs, but I think their leadership is a little too preoccupied with VR to be actively pushing for such a transformative initiative in anything more than a very uninvested capacity (e.g.: "Sure I'll greenlight this. Even if it doesn't pay off I don't have any better ideas")
Pretend you're an uncreative PM on an AI team; what part of Facebook or VR could you feasibly improve by iterating on LLMs? Perhaps the content moderation system... but that would require wrangling with the company ethics comittee and someone else at the company probably already took ownership that idea. You've gotta do something compelling or else your ML engineers are going to run off somewhere else.
If I were to ask my ML engineers about what they wanted to work on, they're going to avoid areas where their model is outgunned (i.e.: chat) and instead prefer lower hanging fruit which generalizes well on a resume (i.e.: "Pioneered and published key innovations in LLM code-generation").
Of course, the alternative answer is that Meta wants to replace all of their jr. developers with GPUs, but I think their leadership is a little too preoccupied with VR to be actively pushing for such a transformative initiative in anything more than a very uninvested capacity (e.g.: "Sure I'll greenlight this. Even if it doesn't pay off I don't have any better ideas")