08/24/2023

The Myth of ‘Open Source’ AI

A new analysis shows AI tools are still controlled by big tech companies

ChatGPT made it possible for anyone to play with powerful artificial intelligence, but the inner workings of the world-famous chatbot remain a closely guarded secret.

In recent months, however, efforts to make AI more "open" seem to have gained momentum. In May, someone leaked a model from Meta, called Llama, which gave outsiders access to its underlying code as well as the "weights" that determine how it behaves. Then, this July, Meta chose to make an even more powerful model, called Llama 2, available for anyone to download, modify and reuse. Meta's models have since become an extremely popular foundation for many companies, researchers and hobbyists building tools and applications with ChatGPT-like capabilities.

"We have a broad range of supporters around the world who believe in our open approach to today's AI... researchers committed to doing research with the model, and people across tech, academia and policy who see the benefits of Llama and an open platform as we do," Meta said when announcing Llama 2. This morning, Meta released another model, Llama 2 Code, that is fine-tuned for coding.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.