SAN FRANCISCO — The largest companies in the tech industry
have spent the year warning that development of artificial intelligence
technology is outpacing their wildest expectations and that they need to limit
who has access to it.
اضافة اعلان
Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down on a different tack: He’s
giving it away.
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said Tuesday that he planned to
provide the code behind the company’s latest and most advanced AI technology to
developers and software enthusiasts around the world free of charge.
The decision, similar to one Meta made in February, could
help the company reel in competitors such as Google and Microsoft. Those
companies have moved more quickly to incorporate generative artificial
intelligence — the technology behind OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot — into
their products.
“When software is open, more people can scrutinize it to
identify and fix potential issues,” Zuckerberg said in a post to his personal
Facebook page.
The latest version of Meta’s AI was created with 40% more
data than what the company released just a few months ago and is believed to be
considerably more powerful. And Meta is providing a detailed road map that
shows how developers can work with the vast amount of data it has collected.
Researchers worry that generative AI can supercharge the
amount of disinformation and spam on the internet, and presents dangers that
even some of its creators do not entirely understand.
Meta is sticking to a long-held belief that allowing all
sorts of programmers to tinker with technology is the best way to improve it.
Until recently, most AI researchers agreed with that. But in the past year,
companies such as Google and OpenAI, a San Francisco startup that is working
closely with Microsoft, have set limits on who has access to their latest
technology and placed controls around what can be done with it.
The companies say they are limiting access because of safety
concerns, but critics say they are also trying to stifle competition. Meta
argues it is in everyone’s best interest to share what it is working on.
“Meta has historically been a big proponent of open platforms,
and it has really worked well for us as a company,” said Ahmad Al-Dahle, vice
president of generative AI at Meta, in an interview.
The move will make the software “open source,” which is
computer code that can be freely copied, modified and reused. The technology,
called LLaMA 2, provides everything anyone would need to build online chatbots
such as ChatGPT. LLaMA 2 will be released under a commercial license, which
means developers can build their own businesses using Meta’s underlying AI to power
them — all for free.
By open-sourcing LLaMA 2, Meta can capitalize on
improvements made by programmers from outside the company while — Meta
executives hope — spurring AI experimentation.
Meta’s open-source approach is not new. Companies often
open-source technologies in an effort to catch up with rivals. Fifteen years
ago, Google open-sourced its Android mobile operating system to better compete
with Apple’s iPhone. While the iPhone had an early lead, Android eventually
became the dominant software used in smartphones.
But researchers argue someone could deploy Meta’s AI without
the safeguards tech giants such as Google and Microsoft often use to suppress
toxic content. Newly created open-source models could be used, for instance, to
flood the internet with even more spam, financial scams and disinformation.
LLaMA 2, short for Large Language Model Meta AI, is what
scientists call a large language model, or LLM. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and
Google Bard are built with large language models.
The models are systems that learn skills by analyzing
enormous volumes of digital text, including Wikipedia articles, books, online
forum conversations and chat logs. By pinpointing patterns in the text, these
systems learn to generate text of their own, including term papers, poetry and
computer code. They can even carry on a conversation.
Meta is teaming up with Microsoft to open-source LLaMA 2,
which will run on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. LLaMA 2 will also be
available through other providers, including Amazon Web Services and the
company HuggingFace.
Dozens of Silicon Valley technologists signed a statement of
support for the initiative, including the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and
executives from Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, Zoom and Dropbox.
Meta is not the only company to push for open-source AI
projects. The Technology Innovation Institute produced Falcon LLM and published
the code freely this year. Mosaic ML also offers open-source software for
training LLMs.
Meta executives argue their strategy is not as risky as many
believe. They say people can already generate large amounts of disinformation
and hate speech without using AI, and that such toxic material can be tightly
restricted by Meta’s social networks such as Facebook. They maintain that
releasing the technology can eventually strengthen the ability of Meta and
other companies to fight back against abuses of the software.
Meta did additional “Red Team” testing of LLaMA 2 before
releasing it, Al-Dahle said. That is a term for testing software for potential
misuse and figuring out ways to protect against such abuse. The company will
also release a responsible-use guide containing best practices and guidelines
for developers who wish to build programs using the code.
But these tests and guidelines apply to only one of the
models Meta is releasing, which will be trained and fine-tuned in a way that
contains guardrails and inhibits misuse. Developers will also be able to use
the code to create chatbots and programs without guardrails, a move skeptics
see as a risk.
In February, Meta released the first version of LLaMA to
academics, government researchers and others. The company also allowed
academics to download LLaMA after it had been trained on vast amounts of
digital text. Scientists call this process “releasing the weights.”
It was a notable move because analyzing all that digital
data requires vast computing and financial resources. With the weights, anyone
can build a chatbot far more cheaply and easily than from scratch.
Many in the tech industry believed Meta set a dangerous
precedent, and after Meta shared its AI technology with a small group of
academics in February, one of the researchers leaked the technology onto the
public internet.
In a recent opinion piece in The Financial Times, Nick
Clegg, Meta’s president of global public policy, argued it was “not sustainable
to keep foundational technology in the hands of just a few large corporations,”
and that historically companies that released open source software had been
served strategically as well.
“I’m looking forward to seeing what you all build!”
Zuckerberg said in his post.
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