Open Sesame! Meta is cracking the AI arms race wide open. Literally. According to a report from The New York Times, Meta-formerly-Facebook is doubling down on its decision to make its large language model called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) — which competes with the likes of OpenAI’s GPT-4 — open source. “The platform that will win will be the open one,” Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, told the NYT, adding that he believes keeping powerful models behind closed doors is a “huge mistake.” It’s a remarkably different strategy compared to those of Meta’s competitors Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which have argued that due to the potential for large-scale misuse, society is safer when the metaphorical Krabby Patty Formula is kept behind closed doors. But according to LeCun, that code-hoarding strategy is dangerous and a “really bad take on what is happening.” “Do you want every AI system to be under the control of a couple of powerful American companies?” LeCun told the NYT. No Good Option As the NYT points out, Meta began to dip its toes into the open-source waters back in February, when it made the underlying code for its advanced large language model available for download via email to anyone that Meta deemed safe. The code, however, was leaked to 4Chan almost immediately. In an experiment, researchers at Stanford used the renegade LLM to build an AI system to capture how it behaved. But they were shocked to find that it was able to…Facebook Has Crowbarred Open the Pandora’s Box of AI, Experts Warn