It's likely partly a PR/branding exercise as well.
In the new world that Meta sees, of VR/AR and AI, Meta is in a position already were people don't want them to have much power in this world, because they don't trust them over privacy etc, meta is trying to pivot to become more trustworthy so they make genuine moves in this space.
That, or this is an ongoing research lab (FAIR) that has existed for ~half a decade and has advanced the state-of-the-art in AI further than Apple, Microsoft and Google combined.
> all of which are also spending a fuck load on internal AI research.
But their internal research stays internal. Sometimes, they put out "papers" which are glorified advertisements, often going as far as hiding the model architecture just to keep their competitive advantage.
If all three of those companies have something to show for their research, none of it is at the scale or level of accessibility Pytorch, Llama and now Audiocraft offer.
In the new world that Meta sees, of VR/AR and AI, Meta is in a position already were people don't want them to have much power in this world, because they don't trust them over privacy etc, meta is trying to pivot to become more trustworthy so they make genuine moves in this space.