Why open-source AI models are good for the world
Live MintOpen innovation lies at the heart of the artificial-intelligence boom. Models that are “open-source"—ie, that make underlying code available to all, to remix and reuse as they please—are often seen as dangerous. Anthropic, a model-maker, has called for urgent regulation, warning about the “unique" risks of open models, such as their ability to be “fine-tuned" using data on, say, making a bioweapon. The Open Source Initiative, an industry body, defines a model as open-source if you can download it and use it as you want, and if a description of the underlying training data is provided. One reason the Open Source Initiative says Meta’s models are not open-source is that access to them is restricted, notably because their use is limited to applications with fewer than 700m monthly users.