Facebook will make its latest AI model free to use

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Facebook will make its cutting edge artificial intelligence technology freely available to the public to use for research and building new moneymaking products, doubling down on an “open source” approach to the tech that has garnered both praise and criticism.

Facebook’s Llama 2 is a “large language model” — a highly complex algorithm trained on billions of words scraped from the open internet. It’s Facebook’s answer to Google’s Palm-2, which powers its AI tools, and OpenAI’s GPT4, the tech behind ChatGPT. App developers will be able to download the model directly from Facebook, or access it through cloud providers including Microsoft, Amazon and open source AI start-up Hugging Face.

The announcement shows how Facebook is doubling down on making its AI openly available, in contrast with companies like OpenAI and Google, which have chosen to keep the details of how their tech works secret and charge for access to it.

As Meta plays catch up with its rivals to produce new artificial intelligence powered services, the company has increasingly promoted the idea that such technology should be open sourced — meaning the underlying code is available for anyone to use. The company argues that by making the technology freely available developers will be better able to create new and exciting AI products as well as new tools to protect the public.

“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we’re open sourcing Llama 2.”

But critics say open sourced AI models could lead to the technology being misused. Earlier this year, Meta released Llama to a select group of researchers only for the model to be leaked and later used for applications ranging from drug discovery to sexually explicit chatbots. Last month, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in June wrote to Zuckerberg arguing that in the short time generative artificial intelligence applications have become more widely available, they have already been misused for problematic content from pornographic deep fakes of real people to malware and phishing campaigns.

“Meta’s choice to distribute LLaMA in such an unrestrained and permissive manner raises important and complicated questions about when and how it is appropriate to openly release sophisticated AI models,” the senators wrote.

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