MARK ZUCKERBERG CEO, Chairman, and Founder, Meta - U.S.

Call it Meta’s Al makeover: The founder has rebuilt the company around the Llama platform—and jumped back into contention in the gen AI race.

- By SHARON GOLDMAN

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 2023, and the question at hand was whether to release a Llama into the wild.

The Llama in question wasn’t an animal: Llama 2 was the follow-up release of Meta’s generative AI model—a would-be challenger to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The first Llama had come out a few months earlier. It had originally been intended only for researchers, but after it leaked online, it caught on with developers, who loved that it was free—unlike the large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—as well as state-of-the-art. Also unlike those rivals, it was opensource, which meant researchers, developers, and other users could access the underlying code and its “weights” (which determine how the model processes information) to use, modify, or improve it.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, and Joelle Pineau, VP of AI research and head of Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team, wanted to give Llama 2 a wide open-source release. They felt strongly that open-sourcing Llama 2 would enable the model to become more powerful more quickly, at a lower cost. It could help the company catch up in a generative AI race in which it was seen as lagging badly behind its rivals, even as the company struggled to recover from a pivot to the metaverse whose meager offerings and cheesy, legless avatars had underwhelmed investors and customers. But there were also weighty reasons not to take that path. Once customers got accustomed to a free product, how could you ever monetize it? And as other execs pointed out in debates on the topic, the legal repercussions were potentially ugly: What if someone hijacked the model to go on a hacking spree? It didn’t help that two earlier releases of Meta open-source AI products had backfired badly, earning the company tongue- lashings from everyone from scientists to U.S. senators.