Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dropped an impassioned expletive while discussing open-source AI with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during a live conversation on Monday.
The two tech leaders discussed the future of artificial intelligence and virtual worlds at SIGGRAPH 2024, an industry conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Zuckerberg believes that one day, every company will have its own AI — much like they have their own social media profiles — and Huang praised that notion, calling Llama 2 “probably the biggest event in AI last year.”
Zuckerberg got excited talking about the open-source AI approach, describing his preference for open models as “selfish” and fueled by a desire to ensure Meta can build the necessary technology the company needs to deliver its social experiences.
“There have just been too many things I’ve tried to build and told ‘nah, you can’t really build that’ by the platform provider, that at some level I’m just like, ‘Nah, fuck that.'” Zuckerberg said Monday. “For the next generation, we’re going to build all the way down.”
“There goes our broadcast opportunity,” Huang joked in response to Zuckerberg’s F-bomb.
“Yeah, sorry,” Zuckerberg chuckled. “We were doing OK for like 20 minutes, but get me talking about closed platforms, and I get angry.”
The CEO’s comments come just days after Meta announced Llama 3.1, its biggest AI model yet, which will be open-sourced — meaning users are able to access, modify, and distribute the source code.
“I’m kind of hopeful that in the next generation of computing, we’re going to return to a zone where the open ecosystem wins and is the leading one again,” Zuckerberg said onstage Monday.
Soon after revealing Llama 3.1 last week, Zuckerberg published a manifesto explaining why he believes open-source is “the path forward” for AI.
In contrast to companies that have taken a closed-source approach — namely OpenAI — Zuck said open source is quickly closing the gap and pointed to the cheaper production costs and higher performance metrics that open-source AI delivers.
Several industry leaders, including Zuckerberg’s sometimes-nemesis Elon Musk, praised Meta for open-sourcing Llama 3.1.
Open-sourcing AI models reduce the time and resources required to create new applications, as well as increase transparency and safety, Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury argued in December.
“There will always be open and closed. I’m not a zealot on this,” Zuckerberg said on Monday. “Not everything we do is open. But in general, there’s a lot of value if the software, especially, is open.
