Free AI Models To Catch Up With ChatGPT, Bard? Open-Source AI Isn’t Always ‘Open’ and Free
The most successful marketing phrase of all time may well be “artificial intelligence,” since, no, computers still can't think. What should take the number two spot? How about, “open-source artificial intelligence”. A popular prediction about the technology's trajectory in 2024 is that open-source AI models will catch up with proprietary ones such as ChatGPT and Google's Bard. That sounds promising at first. If free AI tools become as technically capable as those provided by tech monopolies, that means someone is challenging Big Tech's dominance of what could become the world's most transformative technology.
Except there's a caveat: Some of the most promising open-source AI models are not truly open or free from the control of large tech companies.
Open source refers to software that's freely available for any member of the public to view, modify and distribute as they see fit. Outside of AI, these tools, such as the blog-hosting platform WordPress or the image-editing software GIMP, can seem a little unpolished compared to what you might buy from the likes of Google or Apple Inc., but they have democratized access to new, digital services. WordPress, for instance, allowed millions of small businesses to establish an online presence cheaply.
It now looks like AI is heading in a similar direction, with a number of open-source projects from companies like Mistral and Hugging Face offering free alternatives to the models created by established AI firms. But some of the biggest of these projects are backed by tech giants that have added restrictions running counter to open-source standards — making them not so free after all and their descriptions somewhat misleading.
Meta Platforms Inc., for instance, released an open-source
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