Meta's open AI hardware vision

That title is most definitely a swipe at OpenAI. It seems there’s a theme of two types of platform companies: the closed one that has the “premium” platform, and the open one that gets market share by commodifying the platform.

macOS vs Windows

iOS vs Android

OpenAI vs Meta AI?

Edit: Another observation is Meta seems to open things defensively. Facebook had a rich developer platform until Facebook stopped needing to grab market share. Meta’s VR platform was closed until Apple challenged them with Vision Pro. Then Meta announced open sourcing Horizon OS. I wonder if Meta will truly keep things open if they win, or if it’s more like a case of EEE?

Windows and Android took the commodity approach but they always had a business model, while Meta AI is currently running on Underpants Gnomes economics.

1. Spend billions on a product, then give it away for free.

2. ???

3. Profit!

> Then Meta announced open sourcing Horizon OS.

Open sourcing isn't really the right term, they're allowing third party hardware vendors to use it but it's still proprietary. Horizon OS is built on top of Android and they're following the Android playbook where the core is technically open source but the version nearly everyone actually uses has a bunch of proprietary Google (or Meta) software layered on top, and Google (or Meta) dictates the terms of using that software, which lets them ensure that revenue always flows back to Google (or Meta) regardless of who made the hardware.