In an Instagram post on Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would open the weights for its latest AI model Muse Spark 1.2, meaning it can be downloaded and used by the public. Weights refer to the calculations and rules that determine how the AI works and behaves. He also said that Meta will release a new family of open source models called Muse Glimmer, designed to run on a laptop.
Zuckerberg also published a 6,500-word essay on AI, positioning Meta’s move as a challenge to Chinese open source models which have been gaining increased attention. He also urged Washington to support American open source efforts.
“Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data. U.S. policy must reduce this additional friction if we want American open source models to lead over time,” Zuckerberg wrote.
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“If Western tech giants only build walled gardens, developers and enterprise builders will naturally pivot to Chinese open-weight models,” Neil Shah, co-founder at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC. “Most of its competitors in USA are proprietary and there is an insatiable demand for non-Chinese open models and weights and Meta can fill in this void well.”
“Bringing small, agentic models like Muse Glimmer directly onto PC and mobile hardware bypasses cloud compute costs to outcompete Google, Microsoft and others on the end-user’s device,” Shah said.
Zuckerberg said that the U.S. will have to “rethink” its policies in several areas, including distillation and data use in training, if it is to lead in open source AI. “Distillation” refers to the use of output from an advanced AI model to train another model. This practice has been controversial, with some U.S. lawmakers seeing it as intellectual property theft.
Amid his open source push, Zuckerberg warned against the concentration of power in AI around a few companies.
“Still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future,” Zuckerberg wrote.
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“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic.”
Zuckerberg also said in his essay that rather than centralizing superintelligence “we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it.”
“This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before,” he wrote.
“Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about,” Zuckerberg added.