Do you know what the UK government is currently doing? They're conducting a pretty interesting consultation on whether or not to promote a ban on social media companies for people under the age of 16.
The message from the government is that these platforms are addictive and damaging to people especially with respect to Instagram. The government has singled out Meta.
This week though, the government also announced that Meta is providing $1 million worth of AI experts to be embedded within government, national health service, transport, police, national security and so forth. The Meta people are going to help to redesign the way that all of those organizations work using their Llama AI models.
$1 million is probably not a lot of money to Meta because its likely they can make that amount of money in less than five minutes but that same $1 million will buy Meta access to something far greater than advertising. That access we're talking about is integration. Once the Llama models are deployed inside these organizations and are being used to help set triage standards or make decisions related to security, those organizations will not be able to treat Meta as simply some vendor.
But this is the part where things start to become a little alarming for everyone. The question you should be asking yourself is how do you regulate a company that has a literal presence in your infrastructure?
The short answer is that you cannot. You may be able to regulate them, but it will be a complicated and difficult process for you and it will likely benefit Meta more than the government and the people of the UK.
It's also not very subtle a move to be honest. One government department is trying to determine whether the use of Meta social media platforms should be banned for children, but at the same time, the same government is giving Meta the keys to critical government systems. The two contradictions are ridiculous.Maybe Meta has some sort of view that open source somehow changes their relationship with government.
I don't know much about that, what I do know is that even without a conspiracy to achieve influence or control, there are times that you become so important to an organization that establishing lines of demarcation becomes too costly.