As Meta Flounders, It Reportedly Plans to Open Source Its New AI Models

To say Meta’s attempts to become a leader in AI have thus far fallen short would be like calling Mount Everest a short hike. But the company is pot-committed to the project, with plans to spend more than $600 billion earmarked for AI, so it might as well keep going. According to Axios, the company is finally on the precipice of making its latest models public, and they’ll be available via open-source licensing in the future. Per the report, the new models will be the first released by Meta under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the founder of training data giant Scale AI, which was acquired by Zuckerberg’s company to try to juice its underperforming AI models. While the new releases will reportedly maintain some proprietary parts for alleged safety purposes, the company apparently plans to open-source the models, likely offering licensing agreements to firms that want to use the model instead of going full black box, like many of its competitors. The theory is probably sound for Meta. AI coding giant Cursor recently revealed that it was using the open source model Kimi 2.5, released by Moonshot AI, as the basis for its Composer 2 model. Given how costly it is to train a model from scratch, it seems likely that more operations will take this approach in the future. Meta would be the biggest player in the frontier model market to offer an open-source option, which seems like a much simpler business model than the subscription approach that its competitors are leaning into. T...