The writer is president of global affairs at MetaUnderlying much of the excitement — and trepidation — about advances in generative artificial intelligence lurks a fundamental question: who will control these technologies? The big tech companies that have the vast computing power and data to build new AI models or society at large?
This goes to the heart of a policy debate about whether companies should keep their AI models in-house or make them available more openly. As the debate rumbles on, the case for openness has grown. This is in part because of practicality — it’s not sustainable to keep foundational technology in the hands of just a few large corporations — and in part because of the record of open sourcing.
It’s important to distinguish between today’s AI models and potential future models. The most dystopian warnings about AI are really about a technological leap — or several leaps. There’s a world of difference between the chatbot-style applications of today’s large language models and the supersized frontier models theoretically capable of sci-fi-style superintelligence. But we’re still in the foothills debating the perils we might find at the mountaintop. If and when these advances become more plausible, they may necessitate a different response. But there’s time for both the technology and the guardrails to develop.