Is Mark Zuckerberg flip flopping on open source AI?

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg shared a rambling memo outlining his vision to build AI "superintelligence." In the memo, Zuckerberg hinted that the pursuit of more powerful AI might require the company to be more selective in what it open sources.

Citing "safety concerns" he wrote that Meta would need to be "rigorous" about such decisions. The line stood out to many as Zuckerberg — who once said "fuck that" in reference to closed platforms — has made open source central to Meta's AI strategy.

During Meta's second quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg further acknowledged there could be a shift, though he downplayed the significance of it. Here's what he said when asked if his thinking had changed.

I don't think that our thinking has particularly changed on this. We've always open sourced some of our models and not open sourced everything that we've done. So I would expect that we will continue to produce and share leading open source models. I also think that there are a couple of trends that are playing out. One is that we're getting models that are so big that they're just not practical for a lot of other people to use, so we kind of wrestle with whether it's productive or helpful to share that, or if that's really just primarily helping competitors or something like that. So I think that there's, there's that concern.

And then obviously, as you approach real superintelligence, I think there's a whole different set of safety concerns that I think we need to take very seriously, that I wrote about in my note this morning. But I think the bottom line is I would expect that we will continue open sourcing work. I expect us to continue to be a leader there, and I also expect us to continue to not open source everything that we do, which is a continuation of kind of what we, what we've been, been kind of working on.

That's notably different than what he wrote almost exactly a year ago in a different memo titled "Open Source AI is the Path Forward." In that, even longer note, he said that open source is crucial for both Meta and developers.

"People often ask if I’m worried about giving up a technical advantage by open sourcing Llama, but I think this misses the big picture," he wrote. "I expect AI development will continue to be very competitive, which means that open sourcing any given model isn’t giving away a massive advantage over the next best models at that point in time."

He also argued that open source is safer. "There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. As long as everyone has access to similar generations of models – which open source promotes – then governments and institutions with more compute resources will be able to check bad actors with less compute."

To be clear, Zuckerberg said the company would continue to open source some of its work. But he seems to be laying the groundwork for a future in which Meta's "superintelligence" could be a lot less open.

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