Zuckerberg: ‘Open Source AI Is the Path Forward’

Mark Zuckerberg, in an essay extolling the virtues of Meta’s open source approach to AI development:

People often ask if I’m worried about giving up a technical advantage by open sourcing Llama, but I think this misses the big picture for a few reasons:

First, to ensure that we have access to the best technology and aren’t locked into a closed ecosystem over the long term, Llama needs to develop into a full ecosystem of tools, efficiency improvements, silicon optimizations, and other integrations. If we were the only company using Llama, this ecosystem wouldn’t develop and we’d fare no better than the closed variants of Unix.

Second, I expect AI development will continue to be very competitive, which means that open sourcing any given model isn’t giving away a massive advantage over the next best models at that point in time. The path for Llama to become the industry standard is by being consistently competitive, efficient, and open generation after generation.

Third, a key difference between Meta and closed model providers is that selling access to AI models isn’t our business model. That means openly releasing Llama doesn’t undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers. (This is one reason several closed providers consistently lobby governments against open source.)

Zuckerberg’s argument makes numerous references to Linux winning the war against proprietary Unix variants. I’m not sure how good an analogy that is. Perhaps a better analogy is to programming languages, where instead of one winner (like Linux in the field of operating systems) there are dozens, but they’re all open source, even the ones spearheaded by commercial companies. I’ve been on board with the argument that there is no moat with LLMs, and if there’s no moat, there’s little reason to bank on proprietary solutions. Proprietary solutions require a moat.

One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it’s clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in AI and AR/VR for the next generation of computing.

Apple’s App Store payments commission — which most definitely is not a “tax” — is what it is. But it’s just about money. As for the “product innovations they block from shipping”, one man’s product innovation is another man’s CrowdStrike.

I realize this is an aside in an essay that otherwise has nothing to do with Apple or iOS, but to me it speaks to how obsessed Zuckerberg is with the subordinate role Meta has been relegated to on mobile platforms — which of course are the platforms where Meta’s platforms are primarily used. But what exactly are the innovations Apple has blocked Meta from shipping? Why haven’t they shipped those same innovations on Android, which is significantly more open? Why doesn’t Meta just ship its own phone? Oh wait.

As frustrating as Apple’s control over iOS can be at times — for users, for developers, and for the fifth-wealthiest man on the planet — there are really compelling arguments that iOS has succeeded, and remained so popular for so long, not despite Apple’s opinionated control over the platform but because of it.

★ Friday, 26 July 2024