In February, Meta Platforms set off an explosion of artificial intelligence development when it gave academics access to sophisticated machine-learning models that can understand conversational language. Within weeks, the academics turned those models into open-source software that powered free alternatives to ChatGPT and other proprietary AI software.
Free AI models are now “reasonably close” in performance to proprietary models from Google and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and most software developers will eventually opt to use the free ones, said Ion Stoica, a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, who helped develop a key open-source AI model using Meta’s technology.
