CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerbergwho runs one of the lthe largest technology companies in the world, is advocating for open source AI to ensure “that power is not concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies.”
Zuckerberg published a paper on Facebook on Tuesday pushing for open source AI, or AI publicly available for anyone to copy, modify or use as a basis for further innovation. In the section, “Why open source AI is good for Meta,” Zuckerberg recounted his experience building Meta's services in Apple products are a “key reason” why he believes in open AI development.
“One of my formative experiences has been building our services limited by what Apple will allow us to 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 wouldn't be able to limit what we could to build”.
Zuckerberg highlighted Apple's “arbitrary rules” and “all the product innovations they block from shipping.” He also mentioned Apple developer taxor standard cut 30%. of app sales.
With transparent AI development, Meta and other companies won't be tied to a closed ecosystem created by rivals like Apple, Zuckerberg said.
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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 such as ChatGPT. Meta has collaborated 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 must be open “across generations,” indicating that the long-term strategy of AI- of Meta is open source.
Zuckerberg promoted the images created by Meta AI on Tuesday, asking his Threads followers which of several AI images they liked best.
Meta has already released the open-source AI models Llama and Llama 2, and Zuckerberg says the AI models coming next year will be among the best in the industry.
However, the “open source” labels for Meta models are not without controversy; The open source initiative wrote in July 2023 that Llama 2 of Meta it is not open source because Meta limits how it can be used.
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AI is expensive to develop. Dario Amodei, CEO of $18 billion startup Anthropicsaid earlier this month that it takes about $100 million to train AI, and the price is only going up.
Zuckerberg says the open release of AI “does not reduce” Meta's revenue because selling AI is not Meta's business model.
“I believe open source is necessary for a positive AI future,” Zuckerberg said.