Meta Loves Giving Away Its AI for Free

While the commercialization of artificial intelligence remains the predominant priority for most in Silicon Valley, Meta insists it is delighted to hand out its AI tech gratis. 

There is “really no commercial downside to also making it available to other people,” an effort to spur industry-wide innovation, Meta’s AI chief, Yann Lecun, said Thursday at a company event. 

Unlike competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI, Meta has made its LLaMA 2 model open source, allowing independent developers and those working at other companies to peer under the hood and tinker with the code. Open-source software itself isn’t unusual, but it is unusual to see a company like Meta make such valuable and cutting-edge technology open-source. (Meta has released commercial versions of LLaMA 2, too.)

And while Meta hopes to position itself as the munificent player in Silicon Valley, some experts say LLaMA 2 doesn’t actually meet the traditional definition of open-source software — that the whole thing is, essentially, a PR move.