If Meta succeeds, it could undermine the business models of its Big Tech rivals and make it easier for startups to compete with the likes of OpenAI, while potentially providing fraudsters, state-sponsored hackers and other bad actors access to cutting-edge technology.
Meta released the latest version of its AI, Llama 3, a three months ago. But the new version includes a model trained on much more data than the previous version, potentially expanding its capabilities and providing a new tool for companies and organizations that want to use a larger, more powerful AI model in their products.
“Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an open letter Tuesday. “Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry.”
When OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, it triggered an arms race Big tech companies are in the business of creating new AI products and getting people to pay for them. Microsoft has a multibillion-dollar deal with OpenAI to access its technology, while Google has been building its own AI models and integrating them into its products. Meta has also spent a lot of money on AI, but unlike Microsoft and Google, it doesn’t have a big cloud software company to help it sell that AI to other companies.
Instead, the company has chosen to open source its AI, hoping to create an ecosystem in which companies that don’t have their own AI technology use Meta’s, giving the company influence over vast swaths of the tech world, much in the same way that Google’s control of the Android operating system gives Meta influence over vast swaths of the tech world. its influence on the mobile phone industry.
Meta’s Llama family of AI models has already been downloaded by businesses and individuals 300 million times, said Rob Sherman, Meta’s vice president of policy and deputy chief privacy officer.
The company’s open-source approach has raised concerns among some politicians, activists and AI researchers, who worry that the technology could be used by America’s geopolitical rivals or by criminals and fraudsters. Other open-source AI tools have already been used The company has fiercely defended its approach over the past year, and on Tuesday Zuckerberg reiterated his position in his letter, saying that open tools can be more easily scrutinized by researchers and regulators than the closed systems built by its rivals.
“Open source will allow more people around the world to access the benefits and opportunities of AI, prevent power from being concentrated in the hands of a few companies, and enable a more uniform and secure deployment of the technology across society,” he wrote. Meta also provides tools that companies can use to test the security of their AI systems.
Zuckerberg compared closed AI models to Apple’s practice of making rules and charging fees to developers who want to distribute their apps on iPhones, something Meta has had to deal with for years.
“Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they enforce, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be free to create much better services for people” without the phone maker’s rules, he wrote.
Tuesday’s announcement comes as Meta tries to carve out a new future for itself by developing a suite of AI products that it says will change the way people shop and communicate online.
Earlier this year, Meta began integrating Meta AI into its social media apps, allowing the tool to generate images and answer its users’ questions in search boxes on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.
Across the tech industry, it remains an open question whether consumers will embrace AI tools in their daily lives. Many high-profile AI launches, such as Google’s integration of AI into search results, have resulted in blunders and failures that force companies to remove the product.
“We’re in a phase where the primary goal is to get hundreds of millions or billions of people using Meta AI as a core part of their business,” Zuckerberg told investors in April. “That’s the kind of next goal, building something that’s really valuable.”
