Meta's primary business is capturing attention and selling some of that attention to advertisers. They do this by distributing content to users in a way that maximizes attention. Content is a complement to their content distribution system.
LLMs, along with image and video generation models, are generators of very dynamic, engaging and personalised content.
If Open AI or anyone else wins a monopoly there it could be terrible for Meta's business. Commoditizing it with Llama, and at the same time building internal capability and a community for their LLMs, was solid strategy from Meta.
I find this style changes the way I think about and write code transformations.
It's also in shell pipelines, R's magrittr, and Clojure's thread macros, and can be emulated in some OO languages with methods that return the transformed object itself.
I guess it lets them better utilise their hardware in quiet times throughout the day. It's interesting they all picked 50% discount.