Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why Meta Open-Sources Its AI

Mark Zuckerberg explaining why Meta open-sources its AI on an earnings call Thursday: I know that some people have questions about how we benefit from open sourcing, the results of our research and large amounts of compute. So I thought it might be useful to lay out the strategic benefits here. The short version is that open sourcing 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 for our products much anyway. And more specifically, there are several strategic benefits.

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. Now this is a big deal because safety is one of the most important issues in AI. 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. That's subtle, but the ability to learn and improve quickly is a huge advantage. And being an industry standard enables that.

Third, open source is hugely popular with developers and researchers. And we know that people want to work on open systems that will be widely adopted. So this helps us recruit the best people at Meta, which is a very big deal for leading in any new technology area. And again, we typically have unique data and build unique product integrations anyway, so providing infrastructure like Llama as open source doesn't reduce our main advantage. This is why our long-standing strategy has been to open source general infrastructure and why I expect it to continue to be the right approach for us going forward.

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