Meta to release commercial AI model in effort to catch rivals

Meta is poised to release a commercial version of its artificial intelligence model, allowing start-ups and businesses to build custom software on top of the technology.

The move will allow Meta to compete with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google, which are surging ahead in the race to develop generative AI. The software, which can create text, images and code, is powered by large language models (LLMs) that are trained on huge amounts of data and require vast computing power.

Meta released its own language model, known as LLaMA, to researchers and academics earlier this year, but the new version will be more widely available and customisable by companies, three people familiar with the plans said. The release is expected imminently, one of the people said.

Meta says its LLMs are “open-source”, by which it means details of the new model will be released publicly. This contrasts with the approach of competitors such as OpenAI, whose latest model GPT-4 is a so-called black box in which the data and code used to build the model are not available to third parties.

“The competitive landscape of AI is going to completely change in the coming months, in the coming weeks maybe, when there will be open source platforms that are actually as good as the ones that are not,” vice-president and chief AI scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, said at a conference in Aix-en-Provence last Saturday.

Meta’s impending release comes as a race among Silicon Valley tech groups to establish themselves as dominant AI participants is heating up.

Writing in the Financial Times this week, Meta’s global affairs chief Nick Clegg extolled the virtues of an open source approach, saying “openness is the best antidote to the fears surrounding AI”. But the move also helps Meta in its attempts to catch up with rivals, as an open model would allow companies of all sizes to improve the technology and build applications on it.

Meta has been working on AI research and development for more than a decade but has appeared to be on the back foot after OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot, was released in November, spurring other Big Tech groups to launch similar products.

“The goal is to diminish the current dominance of OpenAI,” said one person with knowledge of high-level strategy at Meta.

Meta declined to comment.

While Meta’s technology is open source and currently free, two people familiar with the matter said the company had been exploring charging enterprise customers for the ability to fine-tune the model to their needs by using their own proprietary data. One person said there were no current plans to charge and Meta would not do so in the upcoming release.

Joelle Pineau, Meta’s vice-president of AI research, declined to comment on the development of a new AI model and how it might be monetised but said: “At the end of the day, because you release something [open source], you don’t completely give up on the intellectual property of that work.”

“We haven’t been shy about the fact that we do want to be using these models [in our] products,” she added.

In 2021, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced a pivot to build an avatar-filled digital world known as a metaverse and has spent more than $10bn a year on the project. That costly ambition has proven unpopular with investors and Meta has recently raced to increase its AI investment. 

Earlier this year, the social networking giant set up a generative AI unit led by chief product officer Chris Cox. Pineau said Cox’s team straddled the research side of AI but also product development, as it was “creating totally new businesses”.

Zuckerberg and other executives have hinted at a push towards creating multiple AI chatbots for individuals, advertisers and businesses across Meta platforms Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, powered by its LLMs.

The benefit of open source models includes a higher take-up by users who then input more data for the AI to process. The more data an LLM has, the more powerful its capabilities can become.

Furthermore, open source models allow researchers and developers to spot and address bugs, improving the technology and security simultaneously — at a time when technology companies such as Meta have faced years of scrutiny over various privacy and misinformation scandals. 

While providing software for free can seem antithetical to making money, experts believe corporations can also use this strategy to capture new markets. 

“Meta realised they were behind on the current AI hype cycle, and this gives them a way to open up the ecosystem and seem like they are doing the right thing, being charitable and giving back to the community,” said one person familiar with the company’s thinking.

Still, there are clear risks with open source AI, which can be shaped and abused by bad actors. Child safety groups report a rise in child sexual abuse imagery generated by AI online, for instance.

Researchers also found that a previous Meta AI model, BlenderBot 2, released in 2021, was spreading misinformation. Meta said it made the BlenderBot 3 more resistant to this content, although users still found it generated false information.

There are also regulatory and legal risks concerning intellectual property and copyright. On Monday, comedian and actor Sarah Silverman filed a lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI over claims her work was used to train models without her consent.

Meta released its open source model LLaMA to researchers in February. A month later, it leaked more widely via the online forum 4chan, prompting developers to build on top of it in breach of Meta’s licensing rules, which specify it should not be used in commercial products.

“This model is out there in ways that we wish it wasn’t,” Pineau said.

Other AI companies, such as French start-up Mistral, are also examining the potential of releasing open source versions of their technology. OpenAI, which has released open source AI models for speech and image recognition previously, said its team was looking into developing an open source LLM, provided they were able to reduce the risks of misuse below a minimum threshold. 

“We have a choice between deciding that artificial intelligence is too dangerous a technology to remain open and putting it under lock and key and in the hands of a small number of companies that will control it,” Meta’s AI chief LeCun said. “Or, on the contrary, open source platforms that call for contributions . . . from all over the world.”

Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw