How Open-sourcing AI made Mark Zuckerberg a Silicon Valley darling, again
Meta open-sourcing its LLaMA AI model made Mark Zuckerberg popular again in Silicon Valley among developers, witch competitors taking notice.
Open-sourcing AI made Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg popular again in Silicon Valley, with competitors following suit. This is despite the 40-year old billionaire founder facing scrutiny over misinformation, privacy and child safety issues.
Since Meta’s first fully open-source AI model called LLaMA 2 was released in July last year, the software has been downloaded more than 180 million times,the company said. A more powerful version of the model, LLaMA 3, which was released in April, reached the top of the download charts on Hugging Face, a community site for A.I. code, at record speed, the New York Times reported.
This was in contrast to Microsoft, OpenAI and Google having more of a closed A.I. strategy to guard their technology as a cautionary measure.
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However in February, Google open sourced the code for two A.I. models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B in a sign that it was feeling the heat from Mr. Zuckerberg’s open-source approach.
Other companies, including Microsoft, Mistral, Snowflake and Databricks, have also started offering open-source models this year.
“This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great, that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can, so that way everyone can benefit,” Mark Zuckerberg said in an Instagram video in January.
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Developers have since, created tens of thousands of their own customized A.I. programs on top of Meta’s A.I. software to perform everything from helping clinicians read radiology scans to creating scores of digital chatbot assistants, the New York Times report read.
Open-source software has a long and storied history in Silicon Valley. Microsoft for instance, lost out to open-source internet infrastructure software and google open-sourced Android to take on Apple’s closed iOS, the New York Times wrote.
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