Meta under fire for ‘polluting’ open-source

Meta has been criticised for calling its artificial intelligence models “open-source” by the group that has spearheaded open-source technology in the software world for the past 25 years.

The social media company is “confusing” users and “polluting” the term open-source by using it to describe its Llama family of large language models, said Stefano Maffulli, head of the Open Source Initiative. The body coined the term open-source in the late 1990s and has been seen as the guardian of the concept ever since.

Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times, Maffulli said this was “extremely damaging” at a time when bodies such as the European Commission were seeking to support true open-source technologies that are beyond the control of any particular company.

Llama, which Meta says has been downloaded more than 400mn times, has become the most popular among a wave of supposedly open-source AI models that have risen to challenge the leading proprietary systems such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini.

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