On the sidelines of the launch of the most powerful open-source model, Llama 3, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg spoke about his vision for AI, affirming that he doesn’t want it to end up like mobile apps – controlled by Apple and Google. 

“One thing that I think generally sucks about the mobile ecosystem is that you have these two gatekeeper companies, Apple and Google, that can tell you what you’re allowed to build,” said Zuckerberg in a recent podcast. 

The Concentration of Power

With the duo exercising control over new applications and models, Zuckerberg believes it is better to build a model themselves to ensure they do not end up in that position. “I don’t want any of those other companies telling us what we can build,” he said. 

Openly challenging the tech biggies, Zuckerberg expressed his disdain for how Apple or Google stores exert control over what is released. He even spoke about how, in the past, when they wanted to launch new features, Apple didn’t allow it. “Nope, you’re not launching that,” Apple had apparently told Zuckerberg.

With AI in the picture, it becomes even more critical not to have a scenario that puts the power into a few hands where their closed models will control APIs and dictate what others can build with it. Zuck believes that Llama’s philosophy of open source should address this issue.  

Meta is doing what OpenAI was supposed to 

Source: X

“In a lot of ways, it’s a very permissive open source license, except that we have a limit for the largest companies using it,” said Zuckerberg, who clarified the limit is to not prevent large companies from using it, rather, initiating a proper partnership with them if they intend to use Meta’s product to build something and resell to make money of it. 

“If you’re like Microsoft Azure or Amazon, if you’re going to be reselling the model, then we should have some revenue share on that. So just come, talk to us before you go do that,” he said.  

Llama 3’s open-source philosophy continues and has witnessed high adoption since its launch last week. Clem Delangue, the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, posted that there are almost 1,000 Llama 3 model variations on the HF platform in a matter of four days.  

The open sourcing route will also allow a user’s work to be differentiated and unaffected by others. “We’ll be able to do what we do. We’ll benefit, and all the systems – ours, and the communities’ – will be better because it’s open source,” said Zuckerberg. 

The thought aligns perfectly with Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, who urges AI to become open-source. LeCun also believes that open-sourcing becomes primary as he does not want a small number of AI assistants run by a few players to dominate the digital world. 

Future of AI Inference

The future mode of communication with the digital world will rely heavily on AI agents. Zuckerberg calls Meta AI the most intelligent, freely available AI assistant that people can use and hints at Meta AI’s ‘general assistant’ type of platform.  

“I think that will shift from something that feels more like a chatbot, where you ask a question and it formulates an answer, to things where you’re giving it more complicated  tasks, and then it goes away and does them,” he said. 

Autonomous AI agents have been on the rise with a number of tech leaders and investors predicting the same. Recently, entrepreneur Vinod Khosla predicted that in another 10-15 years, internet access will be mostly done by AI agents.

He believes that most of the consumer access of the internet will be agents acting for consumers doing tasks and fending off bots. Having billions of agents on the internet will be considered normal. 

While the future may not be exactly well-charted, the potential for an AI to turn up on the app store under the constraints of big tech companies is something Meta is trying to break with Llama. 

Moreover, it’s not new for Google Play Store to exercise undue control over the operations of apps on the platform. Recently, Google delisted a number of prominent apps, including Naukri, 99acres and Bharat Matrimony apps, from their store citing non-compliance with the billing policies.