How AI made Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg popular again in Silicon Valley

Many developers and technologists have embraced the Meta chief as their champion of 'open-source' artificial intelligence

By Mike Isaac

When Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, announced last year that his company would release an artificial intelligence system, Jeffrey Emanuel had reservations.

Emanuel, a part-time hacker and full-time AI enthusiast, had tinkered with “closed” AI models, including OpenAI’s, meaning the systems’ underlying code could not be accessed or modified. When Zuckerberg introduced Meta’s AI system by invitation only to a handful of academics, Emanuel was concerned that the technology would remain limited to just a small circle of people.

But in a release last summer of an updated AI system, Zuckerberg made the code “open source” so that it could be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone.

Emanuel, the founder of the blockchain start-up Pastel Network, was sold. He said he appreciated that Meta’s AI system was powerful and easy to use. Most of all, he loved how Zuckerberg was espousing the hacker code of making the technology freely available — largely the opposite of what Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have done.

“We have this champion in Zuckerberg,” Emanuel said. “Thank God we have someone to protect the open-source ethos from these other big companies.”

Zuckerberg has become the highest-profile technology executive to support and promote the open-source model for AI. That has put the 40-year-old billionaire squarely on one end of a divisive debate over whether the potentially world-changing technology is too dangerous to be made available to any coder who wants it.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have more of a closed AI strategy to guard their tech, out of what they say is an abundance of caution. But Zuckerberg has loudly stood behind how the technology should be open to all.

“This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great, that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can, so that way everyone can benefit,” he said in an Instagram video in January. That stance has turned Zuckerberg into the unlikely man of the hour in many Silicon Valley developer communities, prompting talk of a “glow-up” and a kind of “Zuckaissance.” Even as the chief executive continues grappling with scrutiny over misinformation and child safety issues on Meta’s platforms, many engineers, coders, technologists and others have embraced his position on making AI available to the masses.

Since Meta’s first fully open-source AI model, called LLaMA 2, was released in July, the software has been downloaded more than 180 million times. A more powerful version of the model, LLaMA 3, reached the top of the download charts. Developers have created tens of thousands of their own customised AI programs on top of Meta’s AI software to perform everything from helping clinicians read radiology scans to creating scores of digital chatbot assistants.

 Zuckerberg’s new popularity in tech circles is striking because of his fraught history with developers. Over two decades, Meta has sometimes pulled the rug out from under coders. In 2013, for instance, Zuckerberg bought Parse, a company that built developer tools, to attract coders to build apps for Facebook’s platform. Three years later, he shuttered the effort, angering developers who had invested their time and energy in the project.

A spokeswoman for  Zuckerberg and Meta declined to comment.

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