Meta wants an open AI world. Is that a good idea?

In February of last year, Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—threw a metaphorical grenade into the market for artificial-intelligence software by announcing a new model that it called Llama. Meta’s offering is similar to those offered by OpenAI and Google in that it is an AI engine known as a “large language model.” (I’ve written on a number of occasions about this kind of software and the risks it poses.) But Llama is unique in one critical way: Meta isn’t charging companies to use it or to integrate it into their products, as its competitors do with their tools. Instead, it is giving the software that powers Llama away free of charge, with a so-called “open source” license that allows anyone to use and modify the software for their own purposes (with some restrictions).

Software analysts say that this approach is a risky strategy for Meta—it costs billions of dollars to build an AI engine—but the potential benefits of getting the upper hand in the emerging industry seem to have convinced Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and CEO, that it is a risk worth taking. And Meta has been doubling down on this strategy at a rapid pace: last week, it released the third version of Llama only a few weeks after announcing the second. In a blog post, Zuckerberg said Llama 3.0 (its technical name is Llama 3.1 405B) is the most powerful version of the software yet, and reiterated why he thinks that making the software open-source is good not just for Meta but for the AI industry—and the world—in general.

Zuckerberg also compared his open-source AI engine to the development of Linux, an open-source operating system for computers that has become the standard for cloud servers and mobile devices that run on Android. In the early days of computing, Zuckerberg wrote, major tech companies invested heavily in developing their own closed-source versions of Unix, an operating system for large computers; at the time, he notes, it was hard to imagine “that any other approach could develop such advanced software.” But, even though it was not backed by any multibillion-dollar corporations, Linux grew in popularity, in part because it was free but also because it allowed developers to modify the underlying code to suit their own purposes, and because it was supported by volunteers who fixed problems without asking to be paid. Zuckerberg wrote that he expects AI to “develop in a similar way,” and noted that Meta has historically open-sourced a lot of the software behind its services, through efforts such as the Open Computer Project.

Industry analysts have pointed out that Meta’s interest in an open-source AI model is driven by more than altruism. Unlike competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, the company doesn’t own a cloud-computing service that it can use to both provide the horsepower for its AI offerings and make them available at a low price. It’s thus in Meta’s interests to promote an open approach, one that allows it to form partnerships with cloud providers such as Google Cloud and Amazon’s AWS to host and run Llama. (Anyone can run Llama—but it takes a lot of computing power.) In the Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton compared this to Google offering a free, cloud-based document management system to compete with Microsoft Office.

Open-source advocates have also pointed out that while Meta’s Llama engine can be downloaded and used for free, it doesn’t technically qualify as “open source” because the underlying data that powers the engine—the database of aggregated information that Meta used to train the AI—isn’t itself open. Users who get access to Llama 3.0 can use it and can modify the way it operates and the terms on which it generates results, and they can see what are called the “weights” or values assigned to certain types of data. But they can’t see the data underlying those operations, nor can they modify it. In addition, there are restrictions on who can use the model: if a company has more than seven hundred million users, it has to request a license from Meta directly, and Meta can refuse to let the company use the software if it wants to.

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