Why does Meta give away AI models for free?
Meta's open source strategy is not an act of beneficence, but could be a long term plan to corner the market.
Today there seems to be a tail of two AI companies. On one side, long time Open AI CTO Mira Murati announced her departure from the company. On the other side, Zuckerberg's Meta released Llama 3.2, a free AI language model with visual skills. This comes a couple of weeks after they released the vision model Sapiens which I recently discussed.
What is unique about Meta's release is that they are giving their models away for free, as open source projects. Meaning that Llama 3.2 and Sapiens, among others, can be used by any developer who wants it. Sapiens' for example could be used in many places where breaking down body parts and analysing movement could be useful. Think of creating lifelike human movement for film of video games, or used in health to look at people's posture or gait in rehabilitation. However, it could also supercharge surveillance, for example by tracking minute facial features.
Meta's strategy to release AI models open source is an interesting one. While they are not receiving direct monetary returns for the model, they are trying to cash in in different ways. Soumith Chintala cofounded and lead @PyTorch at Meta explained.
Releasing open source means other developers can work on their models for safety and efficiency. Secondly, if Meta's open source models become industry standard, they are immediately at an advantage as they have the know how to incorporate it into their products easily. Third, open source is popular with developers, meaning it could be a lure for potential researches and developers to chose to work at Meta. All these benefits outweigh the potential to monetise or license their AI models. A company as big as Meta simply doesn't need that cash.
Meta is in a position that Open AI is not, it is not reliant on it's AI arm to make money. Theirs is a long term strategy, if enough people use their models they will become industry standard, if enough developers get on board with open source they could stand to gain important workers. Open source is not a beneficent act but a market strategy.