Meta's Open Questions
If Meta’s transformation is about relocating its moat from attention to infrastructure, then Llama is neither a generosity play nor a pricing attack in isolation. It is a control mechanism.
Yesterday, I provided you with a quantitative analysis of where Meta sits and where it wants to be in the AI stack. This is a qualitative piece around what it means to stay open, and the very hard identity transition Meta is going through.
Open-weight models sit at the boundary between ecosystem expansion and strategic insulation, and Meta is deliberately using that boundary. The mistake most observers make is treating openness as a moral or philosophical stance. In Meta’s case, it is neither. It is an instrument.
The real question is not whether Meta will remain open or eventually close. That framing is static, binary, and misleading.
The relevant question is how openness operates within a vertically integrated strategy in which models are increasingly interchangeable, while infrastructure, deployment economics, and distribution are not.
To understand where Meta is heading, we need to examine what openness actually buys Meta today, when it stops being accretive, and how it can be reshaped as the model layer commoditizes and the infrastructure layer compounds.
