Facebook - Interconnected

($) Llama 3.1 and Its Geopolitical Implications

Allowing output for training, synthetic data use, and more!

Meta Wants to Make AI “Moatless"

When Meta first released its open source foundation AI model, LLaMA, I thought it was a shrewd move to gain public trust for a social media giant with a huge trust deficit. However, the more I think about Meta’s open source AI posture

Topics: ByteDance• Facebook•

How Does TikTok Do Global Expansion

Like it or not, TikTok is now a global phenomenon, not just in terms of cultural relevance, but also as a real business success. (As we all have seen with Twitter, you can be very culturally relevant and still struggle as a business.) Based

Topics: Facebook• ByteDance•

Facebook vs TikTok: Will Every Tech Company Become a Political Campaign?

Long before tech, I cut my teeth working on political campaigns fresh out of college. I was a field staffer on Obama’s first presidential campaign, during a time when smartphones were novel, Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook grew mostly just on college campuses,

Topics: Regulation• Facebook• China•

Removing China’s “Startup Debt”

I’ve been struggling to come up with an elegant analogy to explain China’s regulatory crackdown on its tech industry. After observing this year’s Singles Day [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singles%27_Day], I think I finally found it. Everything that’

Topics: Facebook• Alibaba• Huawei•

November 29, 2020: P(Good for the World)

Hello Interconnected Readers: Last week -- American Thanksgiving plus my birthday week -- I re-read a few books. One of them was “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.” One small part of the book talks about Kenneth Arrow [https://en.wikipedia.org/

Topics: Cloud Industry• Data Center• Facebook•

October 25, 2020: Be Good at Destroying Your Best Ideas

Hello Interconnected Readers: I’m trying something new starting this week. In addition to the six stories summary that you’ve been getting, I will open this weekly issue with a more raw, personal, and reflective letter to you about something I thought about

Topics: Apple• Facebook• Huawei•

October 18, 2020: Censorship, Apple in India, Huawei Selling Honor, Lithography, Chinese IPO

This issue covers the period between October 12 - 18, 2020 with six news stories – three from English language sources, three from Chinese language sources. Disclaimer: all translated article titles are done by me, not official translations from the media outlets. Before you go

Topics: Facebook• Twitter•

Algorithm is the Problem, Not Mark Zuckerberg

I’m an optimist by nature. I instinctively look for the bright spot, silver lining, hopeful sign, even during the darkest of times. This instinctive search has been increasingly hard to carry out in the last two weeks. But I managed to find one

Topics: Stock Market• IBM• Facebook•

Earnings Guidance Is Going Stale. Was It Ever Useful?

Next week is the start of the second quarter earnings season on Wall Street. It’s perhaps the most consequential quarter of financial guidance we’ve had since the Great Depression. During the last few weeks, companies have been [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/

Topics: Cloud Industry• Facebook• Open Source•

Why Is Facebook Not in the Cloud Business?

I’ve written many posts on the global public cloud ecosystem lately, from in-depth comparisons of the big ones: AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, to a few of the less prominent but still very competitive ones: IBM, Oracle, Tencent. All of these