The debate over proprietary versus open source for building artificial intelligence models is a matter of dispute for large language models as it has tended to be in other areas of coding and software development. Meta defended its “open source” approach recently.
Meta benefits from open source because it “improves our models, and because there's still significant
work to turn our models into products, because there will be other open source models available
anyway, we find that there are mostly advantages to being the open source leader and it doesn't
remove differentiation from our products much anyway,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO.
“First, open source software is typically safer and more secure, as well as more compute efficient to operate due to all the ongoing feedback, scrutiny and development from the community,” he said. “Efficiency improvements and lowering the compute costs also benefit everyone including
us.”
“Second, open source software often becomes an industry standard, and when companies
standardize on building with our stack, that then becomes easier to integrate new innovations into our
Products,” Zuckerberg added. “Third, open source is hugely popular with developers and researchers.”
That “helps us recruit the best people at Meta, which is a very big deal for leading in any new technology area,” he argued.
Beyond all that, Meta, as a builder of end user applications, can well take a “layered” approach to business functions. Meta benefits from universal and quality internet access, for example, but it does not have to build all that infrastructure itself.
And if open source allows Meta to stimulate the creation of digital infrastructure, that helps its own business model, much as universal internet access allows Meta to build its own core businesses.
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