Mark Zuckerberg just bought himself a page of The Wall Street Journal to declare that superintelligence is for everyone, that hoarding machine cognition inside a few fortified labs is a civilizational mistake, and I sat there nodding like a dashboard dog because the man is correct. Enclosure is the oldest move in commerce. Fence the commons, then sell tickets back in. The closed labs are running it right now, with their velvet-rope apocalypse, their whispered the fire is too holy for your hands.
And then the nodding stopped, because I remembered who was talking. This is the fox filing an amicus brief on henhouse deregulation. This is the man who fenced the internet, standing at the fence, selling maps of the open range.
So watch the hands. Not the face. The hands.
He says open models and lets your brain autocomplete open capabilities, and those two things are related the way a river is related to a water bill. Open weights are the river: wild, public, anybody's. A capability is the river plus the dam, the turbine, the meter bolted to your wall, the fine print crawling across the meter like ants. It is the model wired into distribution, identity, data, hardware, habit. And every inch of that wiring runs behind Meta's wall, humming a proprietary little tune.
Pop quiz, no notes. Is Facebook open? Can you read the ranking algorithm, swap in your own, pack your social graph like a houseplant and carry it across the street? Is WhatsApp open, the protocol, the network, the address book of two billion souls? Is Instagram? No. No. And no. Twenty years of no, enforced by acquisition and litigation every time the masonry cracked. The most hermetically sealed consumer empire in the history of software just published an essay against enclosure, and not one Terms of Service burst into flame from the friction.
Understand, this is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is amateur hour. This is craft, the founding recipe, the family sauce. Meta was built on open source the way a casino is built on free drinks. Linux in the basement. PHP in the walls. React and PyTorch handed out at the door like party favors. Open at every layer where openness cheapens somebody else's product. Sealed at every layer where the money sleeps. Give away the stone. Charge for the castle. Llama is just the biggest stone yet, genuinely open, genuinely useful, and performing exactly one strategic job: grinding the model layer, where Meta's rivals collect rent, into gravel. When intelligence costs nothing, the money runs downhill to whoever owns the pipes. Guess who spent twenty years buying pipe.
Now ask where this "personal superintelligence" will actually live, because the essay is careful, so very careful, never to say. Not on your machine. Not under your key. It arrives inside Meta's apps and then climbs onto Meta's glasses and rides your face into every room you enter, a chaperone for your eyeballs, seeing what you see, hearing what you hear, filtering the raw world through an interface exactly as inspectable as the News Feed algorithm. Which is to say: sealed like a pharaoh. The weights sit on the internet, free as birdsong. The intelligence you are actually issued lives in the castle. And so, now, do you. Welcome. Wipe your feet. The tour does not stop.
The essay's centerpiece is a parable. Imagine one man with a superintelligent lawyer, Zuckerberg writes, and you get injustice, an unfair edge in every courtroom. Now give everyone a superintelligent lawyer and you get paradise, justice flowing swift and fair. Adorable. Except the lawyer Meta hands you is not retained by you. It is provided free of charge by a firm with other clients, and after two decades we know those clients by name, and none of them are you. You were never the client. You are the billable hours. You have always been the billable hours.
A genuinely open future looks like the internet before the fences: protocols that interoperate instead of networks that digest you. Models running on iron you own. A social graph that is yours, portable, so that leaving a platform does not amputate your friendships at the wrist. Assistants whose loyalty you can audit because their instructions are visible. That commons is the warm primordial soup Zuckerberg himself crawled out of. He dried his fins, turned around, and raised the drawbridge.
Openness is not what you publish. Openness is what you unlock. So unlock it, Mark. Open the graph. Open the protocols. Share the data. Let WhatsApp talk to Signal. Let the feed be swapped for one the reader chooses. Let the glasses run an assistant Meta did not write and cannot read. Do that, and I will eat these words with hot sauce.