Mark Zuckerberg explains why Meta open sources much of its infrastructure: because Meta does not sell cloud access, open-sourcing spurs external innovation, increases manufacturing volume (lowering prices), and improves security through wider scrutiny. He argues open source can aid AI safety by enabling industry-wide patching, and cautions that companies selling proprietary models may oppose open source for commercial reasons and potential regulatory capture.
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We believe that it's generally positive to open source a lot of our infrastructure for a few reasons. One is like we don't have a cloud business, right? It's not like we're selling access to the infrastructure, so giving it away is fine. And then when we do give it away, we generally benefit from innovation, from the ecosystem. And when other people adopt the stuff, it increases volume and drives down prices. We open sourced our server designs and now the factories that are making those kind of servers can generate way more of them because other companies like Amazon and others are ordering the same designs. That drives down the price for everyone, which is good. And also I think it's pretty well established that open source software, it's generally more secure and safer because it's just more scrutinized. Every piece of software has bugs and issues, but the more people who can look at it, the more you're going to basically identify what those issues are and have eyes on fixing them. And when I think about AI safety, I think one of the big issues, if there's like a single superintelligence and it's closed and someone figures out how to exploit it, then like, you know, everyone kind of gets screwed at the same time. Whereas, you know, in an open source system it's like, okay, people find issues and just like your, your Mac or whatever gets patched, right? It's like people find the issues and it just gets rolled out across the industry. I do sometimes get the sense that some of the folks whose business model is to, is to basically sell access to the closed models that they're developing. I do think that they have to be careful because they are also talking their book when they're talking about dangers of open source, either overtly or sometimes behind closed doors. Something will get back to me that's like, oh, like this company was, was kind of, you know, talking about why they're, they're kind of against open source and it's like, yeah, well, their whole business depends on selling access to proprietary models. So I think you got to be careful about that. The regulatory capture thing, I think you need to be careful about for things like that because I do think one of the big benefits of open source is it also just decreases the cost of adoption for small companies and a lot of other folks.
