As a race to lead A.I. heats up across Silicon Valley, Meta is standing out from its rivals by taking a different approach to the technology. Driven by its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta believes that the smartest thing to do is share its underlying A.I. engines as a way to spread its influence and ultimately move faster toward the future.
Its actions contrast with those of Google and OpenAI, the two companies leading the new A.I. arms race. Worried that A.I. tools like chatbots will be used to spread disinformation, hate speech and other toxic content, those companies are becoming increasingly secretive about the methods and software that underpin their A.I. products.
Google, OpenAI and others have been critical of Meta, saying an unfettered open-source approach is dangerous. A.I.’s rapid rise in recent months has raised alarm bells about the technology’s risks, including how it could upend the job market if it is not properly deployed.
Meta’s open-source approach to A.I. is not novel. The history of technology is littered with battles between open source and proprietary, or closed, systems. Some hoard the most important tools that are used to build tomorrow’s computing platforms, while others give those tools away.
