The cause of open-source artificial intelligence — the idea that the inner workings of AI models should be openly available for anyone to inspect, use and adapt — has just passed an important threshold.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, claimed this week that the latest of his company’s open-source Llama models is the first to reach “frontier-level” status, meaning it is essentially on a par with the most powerful AI from companies such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. From next year, according to Zuckerberg, future Llama models will move ahead to become the world’s most advanced.
Whether or not that happens, both the welcome and unwelcome effects of opening up such a powerful technology for general use have been thrown into sharp relief. Models like Llama are the best hope of preventing a small group of large tech companies from tightening their stranglehold on advanced AI. But they could also put a powerful technology into the hands of disinformation-spreaders, fraudsters, terrorists and rival nation-states. If anyone in Washington had been thinking of challenging the open spread of advanced AI, now would probably be the time.