In battle over AI, Meta decides to give away its crown jewels

In February, Meta made an unusual move in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence: It decided to give away its AI crown jewels.

The Silicon Valley giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had created an AI technology, called LLaMA, that can power online chatbots. But instead of keeping the technology to itself, Meta released the system’s underlying computer code into the wild. Academics, government researchers and others who gave their email address to Meta could download the code once the company had vetted the individual.

Essentially, Meta was giving its AI technology away as open-source software – computer code that can be freely copied, modified and reused – providing outsiders with everything they needed to quickly build chatbots of their own.