Tech companies and academics have long wrestled with the risks and rewards of building open source software. But the frenzy around generative artificial intelligence has lent new significance to the debate.
February 09, 2025 at 7:53AM EST
Closed source, by contrast, refers to software and models that are controlled by the developer, can’t be modified, and offer less transparency about their technical underpinnings.Many tech companies brand their AI software as open source; not everyone agrees they all live up to that definition. Meta, for example, offers weights and some of the source code for its Llama series of AI models, but does not provide detailed information about its training data. Meta has also previously been called out by the OSI for licensing terms that include certain restrictions on commercial uses.
For companies such as Meta, there’s an added benefit to open source: popularity. By allowing other developers to freely access and build on top of its open source software, Meta has been able to expand its influence throughout the AI ecosystem.Critics of open source software argue that it’s less secure. In the case of AI, some in the U.S.
The team behind it worked innovatively. While rivals have used a huge number of high-powered computer chips to build similar AI models, DeepSeek team members appear to have found ways to efficiently use the relatively small amount of less-advanced ones they had access to given US export controls on the most cutting-edge chips. And they leaned heavily on a technique known as reinforcement learning that rewards a system for correct answers and punishes it for those that are incorrect.
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