Hard to compete with free
Everyone likes free, and if it comes as open-source software, it allows millions of people to benefit from it.
The origin of open-source software (OSS) can trace its origins to the GNUoperating system. Over the years, many projects sprung under the OSS banner, and you might be familiar with terms like Linux or Apache. Just under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, there are about 320 active projects, which are used by individual developers and large organizations alike. It truly helped move the Internet forward.
And open source is not only about individuals who start projects and gather people with the same interest to work on an idea. Large companies also contribute to projects like this. For example, IBM contributed to open-source software. Google led with its very famous Android OS. Even Microsoft donated some projects to the OSS community (despite the fact that at one point, it called OSS a cancer.)
One can see why an individual person would start a hobby project. Pure intellectual curiosity, satisfaction and collaboration with like-minded people. But why would companies do that? The ‘Cui bono?’ question always comes to mind. That's where altruistic motives quickly dissipate. Suddenly, free software is also used as a competitive weapon.
A good example is Android, the most popular OS for mobile phones. Why is it so popular? Because the only cost to the manufacturer is to build the mobile phone and it can suddenly compete with Apple. What's in it for Google? Millions and millions of people are using Google Search, Google Maps, Google everything. And, as an additional benefit, outside of Apple with its iOS, do you know any other operating system for mobile phones? And trust me, Microsoft tried really, really hard.
Or maybe you remember when IBM partially bankrolled Novell to buy SuSe Linux to compete with Microsoft in 2003.
That brings us to the latest announcement from Facebook, aka Meta. Earlier this month, the Large Language Model called Llama 3 was introduced to the public as open source.
Cui bono? It will definitely benefit Facebook. Reading through the transcript, you learn that '... [their] goal with Meta AI is to build the world's leading AI service both in quality and usage …'
You will also learn that Facebook is planning to spend $35 billion to $40 billion on AI and related products! BTW: that announcement sent the stock down by 16%.
The thing is that unlike other OSS projects, software like Llama 3 requires serious hardware to run it on. Part of the announcement is that it will be available on cloud infrastructure from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and many others, powered by Nvidia chips. As you can imagine, running free software is not going to be cheap either. It also compares the Llama model with others, namely ChatGPT. You would guess correctly that Llama is better than ChatGPT.
Despite the stated goals — make AI safer, improve the code with feedback from developers and other flowery language, the main reason is to get rid of any competition and discourage others from entering the field at all. Perhaps it does explain why Mr. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is trying to raise as much money as he can to avoid the inevitable — the end of his company. He poked all the bears with his ChatGPT, and now he has to fight…all of them.
Despite all the announcements and optimistic talk about the future of AI and its benefits, we are a long way from a mass adoption of this technology.
Freely giving away software worth hundreds of millions will suck out oxygen from the startup scene and will allow the big companies to comfortably sail forward without worries.
The recurrent pattern? Competing with free is hard if you are not the one benefiting from it the most.