Meta just launched the largest ‘open’ AI model in history. Here’s why it matters

tech.hindustantimes.com:

In the world of artificial intelligence (AI), a battle is underway. On one side are companies that believe in keeping the datasets and algorithms behind their advanced software private and confidential. On the other are companies that believe in allowing the public to see what's under the hood of their sophisticated AI models.

Think of this as the battle between open- and closed-source AI.

In recent weeks, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, took up the fight for open-source AI in a big way by releasing a new collection of large AI models. These include a model named Llama 3.1 405B, which Meta's founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, says is “the first frontier-level open source AI model”.

For anyone who cares about a future in which everybody can access the benefits of AI, this is good news.

The danger of closed-source AI – and the promise of open-source AI Closed-source AI refers to models, datasets and algorithms that are proprietary and kept confidential. Examples include ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude.

Also read: WhatsApp to make it easier to use Meta AI with this new feature, check details here

Though anyone can use these products, there is no way to find out what dataset and source codes have been used to build the AI model or tool.

While this is a great way for companies to protect their intellectual property and their profits, it risks undermining public trust and accountability. Making AI technology closed-source also slows down innovation and makes a company or other users dependent on a single platform for their AI needs. This is because the platform that owns the model controls changes, licensing and updates.

There are a range of ethical frameworks that seek to improve the fairness, accountability, transparency, privacy and human oversight of AI. However, these principles are often not fully achieved with closed-source AI due to the inherent lack of transparency and external accountability associated with proprietary systems.

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