Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who leads one of the largest tech companies in the world, is advocating for open-source AI to ensure “that power isn’t concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies.”
Zuckerberg published a letter on Facebook Tuesday pushing for open-source AI, or publicly available AI for anyone to copy, change, or use as the basis for further innovation. In the section, “Why open source AI is good for Meta,” Zuckerberg said his experience creating Meta’s services on Apple products is a “major reason” why he believes in open AI development.
“One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build.”
Zuckerberg highlighted Apple’s “arbitrary rules,” and “all the product innovations they block from shipping.” He also mentioned Apple’s developer tax, a standard 30% cut of app sales.
With transparent AI development, Meta and other companies wouldn’t be tied to a closed ecosystem created by rivals like Apple, Zuckerberg stated.
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Zuckerberg also announced a new open source Meta AI model: Llama 3.1, and said it has better cost and performance than closed models, like ChatGPT. Meta has partnered with Nvidia and Amazon to help developers create and fine-tune their models, and Zuckerberg says that for Meta’s AI to become the industry standard, its AI models have to be open “generation after generation,” indicating that Meta’s long-term AI strategy is open source.
Zuckerberg touted images generated by Meta AI on Tuesday, asking his Threads followers which of a few AI images they liked the most.
Meta has already released open-source AI models Llama and Llama 2, and Zuckerberg says that the AI models to come next year will be among the best in the industry.
However, the “open source” labels for Meta’s models are not without controversy; the Open Source Initiative wrote in July 2023 that Meta’s Llama 2 is not open source because Meta restricts how it can be used.
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AI is pricey to develop. Dario Amodei, the CEO of $18 billion AI startup Anthropic, said earlier this month that it takes about $100 million to train AI, and the price is only going up.
Zuckerberg says opening releasing AI “doesn’t undercut” Meta’s revenue because selling AI isn’t Meta’s business model.
“I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future,” Zuckerberg stated.
