In Battle Over AI, Meta Decides To Give Away Its Crown Jewels

IN FEBRUARY, META made an unusual move in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence: It decided to give away its AI crown jewels.

- CADE METZ & MIKE ISAAC

The Silicon Valley giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had created an AI technology, called LLaMA, that can power online chatbots. But instead of keeping the technology to itself, Meta released the system's underlying computer code into the wild. Academics, government researchers and others who gave their email address to Meta could download the code once the company had vetted the individual.

Essentially, Meta was giving its AI technology away as open-source software - computer code that can be freely copied, modified and reused - providing outsiders with everything they needed to quickly build chatbots of their own.

"The platform that will win will be the open one," Yann LeCun, Meta's chief Al scientist, said in an interview.

As a race to lead AI heats up across Silicon Valley, Meta is standing out from its rivals by taking a different approach to the technology. Driven by its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta believes that the smartest thing to do is share its underlying AI engines as a way to spread its influence and ultimately move faster toward the future.