9 Notable Quotes From Mark Zuckerberg's Essay in Favor of Open Source AI

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.

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.)

Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn’t concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society.

Open source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized.

We must keep in mind that these models are trained by information that’s already on the internet, so the starting point when considering harm should be whether a model can facilitate more harm than information that can quickly be retrieved from Google or other search results.

As long as everyone has access to similar generations of models – which open source promotes – then governments and institutions with more compute resources will be able to check bad actors with less compute.

The United States’ advantage is decentralized and open innovation.