Zuck Wants to Hand AI Power to the People. That Makes More Sense for Meta Than Its Rivals

Mark Zuckerberg is making moves to be the AI guy — not the social media guy or the metaverse guy. Meta on Monday unveiled the parameters of its new AI model, Muse Glimmer, and CEO Zuckerberg published 6,500 words of AI musings. 

Zuck asks AI companies to take down their gates so the tech’s top secrets won’t be restricted to a handful of institutions. He discourages AI doomers, instead taking an optimistic view of AI’s future — but only if AI becomes more open to both developers and anyone who wants to, as Zuck’s personal example goes, build a robot with their dad. 

Share It With the Rest of the Class

Zuckerberg wants AI-makers to let everyone copy their homework, and Meta is leading by example. Developers can download the parameters or “weights” of Muse Glimmer and tweak them as they please, meaning the model is “open.” Meta said it plans to release the parameters of a version of its main Muse Spark model soon, too. The top AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, by contrast, are under lock and key. 

While Zuck frames the switch to open-source as a philosophy for everyone’s best AI future, it also may make more business sense for Meta than its rivals:

• ChatGPT surpassed 1 billion monthly active users earlier this year, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Meta has said its AI also has more than 1 billion users, but analysts have questioned the stat since Meta’s AI is embedded into its family of popular apps. Meta has also fallen behind Anthropic and Claude when it comes to coding, writing and other benchmarks.
• Zuckerberg also pushed for people to rethink their negative opinions on “distillation,” when one model is trained on another. Anthropic in June accused China’s Alibaba of using distillation to train its Qwen AI model, sparking a debate about whether the practice amounts to IP theft. 

Heart on His Sleeve: One of Zuck’s shirts reads, “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing.” Zuckerberg is going all-in on his AI optimism, with Meta planning to spend as much as $145 billion on the tech this year. But he could be feeling added pressure to make AI a success after the last time he went “aut Zuck,” when his expensive bet on the metaverse didn’t live up to the hype.