Can AI even be open source? It's complicated
It's not just that AI's early roots spring from the 1960s' open language Lisp; the headline AI generative models, such as ChatGPT, Llama 2, and DALL-E, are built on solid, open-source foundations. However, those models and programs themselves are not open source.
Oh, I know that when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Llama 3.1 in a Threads post, he said, "Open-source AI is the path forward," and that Meta is "taking the next steps towards open-source AI becoming the industry standard."
We're not pursuing [open source] out of altruism, though I believe it will benefit the ecosystem. We're doing it because we think it will enhance our offerings by creating a strong ecosystem. … this might sound selfish, but after building this company for a while, one of my goals for the next 10 or 15 years is to ensure we can build the fundamental technology for our social experiences.
Zuckerberg is sincere about open source. As we've seen repeatedly, open source is the way to unite technologies. For example, we use a unified Linux now instead of multiple, incompatible versions of Unix because Linus Torvalds open-sourced Linux under GPLv2.
