Meta AI Releases A Multimodal Model "CM3leon" — But Won’t Release It

Meta AI, the AI arm of Mark Zuckerberg owned Meta, has introduced a multimodal model  "CM3leon" (pronounced like chameleon), that does both text-to-image and image-to-text generation. Similar to its previous models, the company has decided not to release the model code which has enraged AI enthusiasts. 

The AI model bridges the gap between text and images. With its capabilities in text-guided image generation and editing. The model  has the potential to revolutionise the approach in which current users interact with and manipulate visual content.

According to Meta, its model boasts improved capabilities in producing coherent imagery that closely aligns with input prompts. What sets CM3leon apart is its efficiency, as it requires only five times the computing power and a smaller training dataset compared to previous transformer-based methods.

Meta touts CM3leon's prowess in various vision-language tasks, including visual question answering and long-form captioning. This novel approach by Meta marks a departure from the diffusion method commonly employed in image generation. Instead, the company's researchers opted for the Transformer architecture, a neural network design widely recognized for its successful implementation in large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4. While CM3leon is not the first transformer-based image generator—StyleSwin precedes it—Meta asserts that it surpasses other contenders in terms of efficiency.

Though the model is being lauded for being state-of-the-art the fact that it is closed source makes the research community irk. Similarly, last month the tech giant unveiled Voicebox but did not make the model public over fears of potential misuse. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility,” Meta had stated while releasing the paper.  

Again, Meta is not the only tech goliath gatekeeping its research. Even though companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple have contributed tons to research over the years — they also have kept a major chunk of it to themselves. The reason this displeases the research community is because these companies have been dependent on the open source community yet refuse to contribute as much as they gain. 

Read more: Big Techs Flip-Flop on Open Source