With new open models, Meta pitches another reboot of its struggling AI strategy
Open weights, open access
Alongside the model releases, Mark Zuckerberg is credited as the author of a lengthy open letter that details Meta’s corporate strategy with AI, and a broader argument for how AI should be developed, distributed, and regulated.
It follows several statements by other Big Tech and AI company leaders debating the merits of open-weight models, proprietary labs, and the practice of distillation—something that some Chinese labs have reportedly done to build models that compete with the latest efforts from Anthropic and others.
On July 24, several companies including Nvidia, Hugging Face, Meta, Mistral, Mozilla, OpenAI and others co-signed an open letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” that argued for the value of open-weight models as opposed—or at least in addition—to proprietary ones, and defended distillation as a legitimate practice, even as it carved out a distinction for “unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models.” It advocated for “targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.”
On the topic of distillation, Meta and Zuckerberg wrote:
The ability for models to learn from other models is an important principle of how the open source ecosystem works. All AI models are derived from human knowledge. Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe.
However, the majority of the essay focused on the notion of decentralized AI systems that are distributed widely. It also directly aims at arguments that tightly controlled, proprietary AI models and systems are needed because of concerns about existential threats or catastrophic misalignment:
It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic.
Zuckerberg wrote that the view of alignment taken by companies like Anthropic—which claims that it is trying to train singular and broad foundation models with operational parameters and guardrails that will ensure they benefit humanity broadly—is “fundamentally flawed.”