In February, Meta made an unusual move in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence: It decided to give away its AI crown jewels.
The Silicon Valley giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had created an AI technology, called LLaMA, which can create online chatbots. But instead of keeping the technology to himself, Meta released the system’s underlying computer code into the wild. Academia, government researchers and others who gave their email address to Meta could download the code if the company had verified the individual.
Essentially, Meta gave away its AI technology as open-source software—computer code that can be freely copied, modified, and reused—providing outsiders with everything they needed to quickly build their own chatbots.
“The platform that will win will be the open one,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, said in an interview.
As a race to lead AI heats up across Silicon Valley, Meta stands out from its rivals by taking a different approach to the technology. Driven by its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta believes that the smartest thing to do is to share its underlying AI engines as a way to spread its influence and ultimately move faster into the future.
Its actions contrast with those of Google and OpenAI, the two companies leading the new AI arms race. Worried that AI tools like chatbots will be used to spread disinformation, hate speech and other toxic content, those companies are becoming increasingly secretive about the methods and software that underpin their AI products.
Google, OpenAI and others have been critical of Meta, saying an unfettered open-source approach is dangerous. The rapid rise of AI in recent months has raised alarm bells about the risks of the technology, including how it could upend the job market if not deployed properly. And within days of LLaMA’s release, the system leaked on 4chan, the online message board known for spreading false and misleading information.
“We want to think more carefully about giving away details or open source code” of AI technology, said Zoubin Ghahramani, a Google vice president of research who helps oversee AI work. “Where can that lead to abuse?”
But Meta said it saw no reason to keep its code to itself. The increasing secrecy at Google and OpenAI is a “huge mistake,” said Dr. LeCun, and a “really bad opinion of what’s going on.” He argues that consumers and governments will refuse to embrace AI unless it is out of the control of companies like Google and Meta.
“Do you want every AI system to be under the control of a few powerful American companies?” he asked.
OpenAI declined to comment.
Meta’s open source approach to AI is not new. The history of technology is full of battles between open source and proprietary, or closed, systems. Some are hoarding the key tools used to build the computing platforms of tomorrow, while others are giving those tools away. Most recently, Google open-sourced the Android mobile operating system to take on Apple’s dominance in smartphones.
Many companies have openly shared their AI technologies in the past, at the urging of researchers. But their tactics are changing because of the race for AI. That shift started last year when OpenAI released ChatGPT. The chatbot’s wild success wowed consumers and kicked up competition in the AI field, with Google moving quickly to incorporate more AI into its products and Microsoft investing $13 billion in OpenAI.
While Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have since received most of the attention in AI, Meta has also invested in the technology for nearly a decade. The company has spent billions of dollars building the software and hardware needed to implement chatbots and other “generative AI,” which produce text, images and other media on their own.
In recent months, Meta has been working furiously behind the scenes to weave its years of AI research and development into new products. Mr. Zuckerberg is focused on making the company an AI leader, holding weekly meetings on the topic with his executive team and product leaders.
Meta’s biggest AI move in recent months was the release of LLaMA, which is what’s known as a large language model, or LLM (LLaMA stands for “Large Language Model Meta AI.”) LLMs are systems that skill learn by analyzing large amounts of text, including books, Wikipedia articles and chat logs. ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot are also built on top of such systems.
LLMs identify patterns in the text they analyze and learn to generate their own text, including term papers, blog posts, poetry, and computer code. They can even carry complex conversations.
In February, Meta openly released LLaMA, allowing academics, government researchers and others who provided their email address to download and use the code to build their own chatbot.
But the company went further than many other open source AI projects. It allowed people to download a version of LLaMA after it was trained on huge amounts of digital text pulled from the Internet. Researchers call this “releasing the weights,” referring to the particular mathematical values learned by the system as it analyzes data.
This was important because analyzing all that data typically requires hundreds of specialized computer chips and tens of millions of dollars, resources most companies don’t have. Those with the skills can deploy the software quickly, easily and cheaply, spending a fraction of what it would otherwise cost to create such powerful software.
As a result, many in the tech industry believed that Meta had set a dangerous precedent. And within days someone released the LLaMA weights on 4chan.
At Stanford University, researchers used Meta’s new technology to build their own AI system, which was made available on the Internet. A Stanford researcher named Moussa Doumbouya soon used it to generate problematic text, according to screenshots seen by The New York Times. In one instance, the system gave instructions for disposing of a dead body without getting caught. It also generated racist material, including comments supporting the views of Adolf Hitler.
In a private conversation among the researchers, which was seen by The Times, Mr. Doumbouya said that distributing the technology to the public would be like “a grenade available to everyone in a grocery store”. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Stanford promptly removed the AI system from the Internet. The project was designed to provide researchers with technology that “captured the behavior of modern AI models,” said Tatsunori Hashimoto, the Stanford professor who led the project. “We took down the demo because we became increasingly concerned about abuse potential outside of a research setting.”
Dr. LeCun states that this type of technology is not as dangerous as it seems. He said small numbers of individuals can already generate and spread disinformation and hate speech. He added that toxic material could be tightly restricted by social networks such as Facebook.
“You can’t prevent people from creating nonsense or dangerous information or whatever,” he said. “But you can prevent it from spreading.”
For Meta, more people using open-source software can also level the playing field as it competes with OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. If every software developer in the world builds programs using Meta’s tools, it can help strengthen the company for the next wave of innovation, and avoid potential irrelevance.
Dr. LeCun also pointed to recent history to explain why Meta is committed to open-sourcing AI technology. He said the evolution of the consumer Internet was the result of open, common standards that helped build the fastest, most widespread knowledge-sharing network the world had ever seen.
“Progress is faster when it’s open,” he said. “You have a more vibrant ecosystem where everyone can contribute.”
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