When? Mark ZuckerbergWhen Meta's CEO announced last year that his company would release an artificial intelligence system, Jeffrey Emanuel had objections.
Mr Emmanuel, a part-time hacker and full-time AI enthusiast, had tinkered with “closed” AI models, including OpenAI, meaning the system's underlying code could not be accessed or modified. When Mr Zuckerberg introduced Meta's AI system by invitation only According to some academics, Mr Emmanuel was concerned that this technology would be limited to only a few people.
But when releasing an updated AI system last summer, Mr Zuckerberg made the code “open source”, so that it could be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone.
Mr Emmanuel, founder of blockchain start-up Pastel Network, was sold. He said he appreciated Meta's AI system which is powerful and easy to use. Most of all, he liked how Mr Zuckerberg was supporting Hacker Code Making technology available free of cost – This is in stark contrast to what Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have done.
“We have this champion in Zuckerberg,” said Mr. Emanuel, 42. “Thank God we have someone protecting the open-source spirit from these other big companies.”
Mr Zuckerberg has become the most high-profile technology executive to support and promote an open-source model for AI, putting the 40-year-old billionaire on one end of a divisive debate over whether the potentially world-changing technology is right for the world. Very dangerous It will be made available to any coder who wants it.
Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have adopted a closed AI strategy to protect their technology, which they say is too much caution. But Mr Zuckerberg has insisted that the technology should be open to all.
“This technology is so important, and the opportunities so great, that we should open source it and make it as widely available as possible, so everyone can benefit,” he said. Instagram Videos In January.
This stance has made Mr. Zuckerberg an unexpected figure in many Silicon Valley developer communities. Promoting discussion of “shine” And a kind of “Zookaissence”. Even as the chief executive grapples with misinformation and investigations Child safety issues On Meta's platforms, many engineers, coders, technologists, and others have embraced his stance of making AI available to the general public.
Since Meta, the first fully open-source AI model, which Lama 2, Since its release in July, the software has been downloaded more than 180 million times, the company said. A more powerful version of the model, LLaMA 3, released in April, rose to the top of the download charts at record speed on Hugging Face, a community site for AI code.
Developers have created thousands of their own customized AI programs based on Meta's AI software, which can do everything from helping physicians read radiology scans to powering digital chatbot assistants.
“I said to Mark, I think open sourcing LLaMA is the most popular thing Facebook has ever done in the tech community,” Patrick Collison, chief executive of payments company Stripe, said recently. got included in A meta strategist Advisory Group It is intended to help the company make strategic decisions about its AI technology. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and other apps.
Mr. Zuckerberg's new popularity in the tech world is surprising given his tense history with developers. Over the past two decades, Meta has occasionally pulled the ground out from under coders' feet. In 2013, for instance, Mr. Zuckerberg Pars boughta company that made developer tools to attract coders to create apps for Facebook's platform. Three years later, he stopped tryingThis angered the developers who had invested their time and energy into the project.
Mr. Zuckerberg and a Meta spokesman declined to comment. (The New York Times wrote last year) filed a suit on (OpenAI and its partner Microsoft have claimed copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
Open-source software has a long and proud history in Silicon Valley, with major tech battles revolving around open versus proprietary – or closed – systems.
In the early days of the Internet, Microsoft competed to provide software to run the Internet infrastructure but eventually lost out to open-source software projects. More recently, Google open-sourced its Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple's closed iPhone operating system. Firefox, the Internet browser, WordPress, a blogging platform, and Blender, a popular set of animation software tools, were all created using open-source technologies.
Mr Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004, has long been a supporter of open-source technology. In 2011, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project, a non-profit that freely shares designs of servers and equipment inside data centres. In 2016, Facebook also developed PyTorch, an open-source software library that has been widely used to build AI applications. The company has also been sharing blueprints of the computing chips it develops.
“Mark is a great student of history,” said Daniel Ek, Spotify's chief executive, who considers Mr. Zuckerberg a confidante. “Over time in the computing industry, he has seen that there have always been closed and open paths. And he has always chosen the open path.”
At Meta, the decision was made to open source their AI. ControversialIn 2022 and 2023, the company's policy and legal teams favored a more conservative approach to releasing the software, fearing a backlash among regulators in Washington and the European Union. But meta technologists such as Yann LeCun and Joëlle Pineau, who lead AI research, pushed for the open model, which they argued would better benefit the company in the long term.
The engineers won. Mr. Zuckerberg agreed that if the code were open, it could be improved and secured faster, he said in an interview. Post He had said this on his Facebook page last year.
While open sourcing LLAMA would mean giving away computer code that Meta has spent billions of dollars building, with no immediate return on investment, Mr. Zuckerberg Call This can be called “good business.” As more developers use Meta's software and hardware devices, the more likely they are to invest in its technology ecosystem, which helps make the company stronger.
The technology has also helped Meta improve its internal AI systems, helping with ad targeting and recommending more relevant content on Meta’s apps.
“This is 100 percent aligned with Zuckerberg's incentives and how it can benefit Meta,” said Noor Ahmed, a researcher at MIT Sloan who studies AI. “LLaMA is beneficial to everyone.”
Competitors are taking note. In February, Google has open-sourced the code for two AI models, Gemma 2b and Gemma 7b, a sign that it was feeling pressure from Mr. Zuckerberg's open-source approach. Google did not respond to requests for comment. Other companies, including MicrosoftMistral, Snowflake, and Databricks also began offering open-source models this year.
For some coders, Mr. Zuckerberg's AI approach hasn't erased all the burdens of the past. Sam McLeod, 35, a software developer in Melbourne, Australia, deleted his Facebook accounts years ago after becoming uncomfortable with the company's track record on user privacy and other factors.
But more recently, he said, he believed Mr. Zuckerberg had released “cutting-edge” open-source software models with “permissive licensing terms,” which could not be said for other big tech companies.
Matt Schumer, a 24-year-old developer from New York, said he had used Mistral and OpenAI's closed AI models to power the digital assistant for his start-up Hyperwrite. But after Meta released its updated open-source AI model last month, Mr. Schumer began relying heavily on that instead. Whatever doubts he had about Mr. Zuckerberg are now a thing of the past.
“Developers have begun to overlook many of the problems they had with him and Facebook,” Mr. Schumer said. “Right now, what he's doing is really good for the open-source community.”