Meta Gives Away a Powerful AI Program for Free, Including to Businesses

Llama 2, a language program in the same class as the one behind ChatGPT, can be downloaded by anyone and used commercially at no cost. Meta's bet is that an open version will become the standard, the way its rivals' closed ones cannot.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released a program today called Llama 2, and the terms are the story. It is a large language program — the kind that powers chatbots — in roughly the same class as the one behind ChatGPT. Anyone can download it. Businesses can build products on it. It costs nothing, and Meta has partnered with Microsoft to make it easy to run on Microsoft's cloud computers.

This is the opposite of what OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic do. They keep their programs on their own computers and sell access, and they argue that releasing them outright would be dangerous. Meta's argument is that openness is safer, because more people can find and fix problems, and that it is also better business: if the world's developers build on Llama, the world's AI ecosystem grows up around Meta rather than around its competitors. Mark Zuckerberg has said the company has no plans to charge for it.

The first Llama, released in February, was meant for researchers only, and its files leaked onto the internet within a week. The programs people built on that leak — many of them small enough to run on a laptop — convinced Meta that trying to control it was pointless. A memo from a Google engineer that circulated in May made the same point from the other side: "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI."

Llama 2 is not as capable as GPT-4, by Meta's own testing, and the license has limits — a company with more than 700 million users has to ask permission. But it is good enough for most uses, and as of today it is free. The gap between the AI you can buy and the AI you can have has just become a lot smaller.