When Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, announced last year that his company would launch an artificial intelligence system, Jeffrey Emanuel had reservations.
Mr. Emanuel, a part-time hacker and full-time AI enthusiast, had tinkered with “closed” AI models, including OpenAI, meaning the systems’ underlying code could not be accessed or modified . When Mr. Zuckerberg presented Meta’s AI system by invitation only to a handful of academics, Mr. Emanuel worried that the technology would remain limited to a small circle of people.
But in last summer’s release of an updated AI system, Mr. Zuckerberg made the code “open source” so that it could be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone.
Mr. Emanuel, founder of blockchain startup Pastel Network, has been sold. He said he liked that Meta’s AI system was powerful and easy to use. Most of all, he liked the way Mr. Zuckerberg adopted hackers’ code to make technology available for free — largely the opposite of what Google, OpenAI and Microsoft did.
“We have this champion in Zuckerberg,” Mr. Emanuel, 42, said. “Thank God we have someone to protect the open source philosophy of these other big companies.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has become the most high-profile technology executive to support and promote the open source model for AI. That placed the 40-year-old billionaire squarely at one end of a contentious debate over whether the potentially revolutionary technology is as dangerous as being made available to any coder who wants it.
Microsoft, OpenAI and Google instead have a closed AI strategy to protect their technology, out of what they say is an abundance of caution. But Mr. Zuckerberg loudly defended the need to open technology to everyone.
“This technology is so important and the opportunities are so great that we should open it up and make it as widely available as responsibly possible, so that everyone can benefit from it,” he said in an Instagram video in January.
This stance has made Mr. Zuckerberg the unlikely man of the moment in many Silicon Valley developer communities, leading to talk of a “conflagration” and a sort of “Zuckaissance.” Even as the CEO continues to combat misinformation and child safety concerns on Meta’s platforms, many engineers, coders, technologists and others have adopted his stance on making AI available to the general public .
Since the release of Meta’s first fully open source AI model, called LLaMA 2, in July, the software has been downloaded more than 180 million times, the company said. A more powerful version of the model, LLaMA 3, released in April, reached the top of the download charts on Hugging Face, an AI code community site, at record speed.
Developers have created tens of thousands of their own custom AI programs on top of Meta’s AI software to do everything from helping clinicians read x-ray exams to creating dozens of assistants digital chatbots.
“I told Mark that I think open source LLaMA is the most popular thing Facebook has ever done in the tech community,” said Patrick Collison, chief executive of payments company Stripe, which recently joins a Meta strategic advisory group. aimed at helping the company make strategic decisions regarding its AI technology. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and other apps.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s newfound popularity in tech circles is striking because of his storied history with developers. In two decades, Meta has sometimes pulled the rug out from under coders. In 2013, for example, Mr. Zuckerberg bought Parse, a company that developed developer tools, to encourage coders to create applications for the Facebook platform. Three years later, he ended his efforts, angering developers who had invested their time and energy in the project.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Zuckerberg and Meta declined to comment. (Last year, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems.)
Open source software has a long and storied history in Silicon Valley, with major technology battles over open and proprietary – or closed – systems.
In the early days of the Internet, Microsoft struggled to provide the software to manage Internet infrastructure, only to lose out to open source software projects. More recently, Google opened up its Android mobile operating system to take on Apple’s closed iPhone operating system. Firefox, the Internet browser, WordPress, a blogging platform, and Blender, a popular set of animation software tools, were all built using open source technologies.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in 2004, has long supported open source technology. In 2011, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project, a nonprofit organization that freely shares designs of servers and equipment within data centers. In 2016, Facebook also developed Pytorch, an open source software library widely used for creating AI applications. The company also shares blueprints for computer chips it has developed.
“Mark is a great student of history,” said Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, who considers Mr. Zuckerberg a confidant. “Over time, in the IT industry, he found that there were always closed and open paths to take. And it always chose to open by default.
At Meta, the decision to open source its AI was controversial. In 2022 and 2023, the company’s policy and legal teams supported a more conservative approach to releasing the software, fearing a backlash from regulators in Washington and the European Union. But Meta technologists like Yann LeCun and Joelle Pineau, who lead AI research, have pushed the open model, which they say would benefit the company more in the long run.
The engineers won. Mr. Zuckerberg recognized that if the code was open, it could be improved and backed up more quickly, he said last year in a post on his Facebook page.
While open source LLaMA means giving away computer code that Meta spent billions of dollars to create without an immediate return on investment, Mr. Zuckerberg calls it a “good deal.” As more developers use Meta’s software and hardware tools, the more likely they are to invest in its technology ecosystem, helping to strengthen the company.
The technology has also helped Meta improve its own internal AI systems, making it easier to target ads and recommend more relevant content across Meta’s apps.
“This is 100% consistent with Zuckerberg’s incentives and how this can benefit Meta,” said Nur Ahmed, a researcher at MIT Sloan who studies AI. “LLaMA is a win-win for everyone.”
Competitors are taking note. In February, Google open sourced the code for two AI models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, a sign that it was feeling the pressure from Mr. Zuckerberg’s open source approach. Google did not respond to requests for comment. Other companies, including Microsoft, Mistral, Snowflake and Databricks, also began offering open source models this year.
For some coders, Mr. Zuckerberg’s AI approach hasn’t erased all the baggage from the past. Sam McLeod, 35, a software developer in Melbourne, Australia, deleted his Facebook accounts years ago after becoming uncomfortable with the company’s track record on user and other privacy factors.
But more recently, he said, he acknowledged that Mr. Zuckerberg had released “cutting-edge” open-source software models with “permissive licensing terms,” which cannot be said for others large technology companies.
Matt Shumer, 24, a developer in New York, said he used closed AI models from Mistral and OpenAI to power digital assistants at his startup, HyperWrite. But after Meta released its updated open-source AI model last month, Mr. Shumer began leaning heavily on it. Whatever reservations he had about Mr. Zuckerberg are in the past.
“Developers started to see past a lot of the problems they had with it and Facebook,” Mr. Shumer said. “Right now, what he’s doing is really good for the open source community.”