A battle is raging over the definition of open-source AI
Companies that bet on the right one could win big.
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Content creators test Meta AI 3.1 features at the Meta Connect annual event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept 24.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
There are two sides to the software industry. One faces outwards, with whizzy products and services that bring in billions of dollars of revenue for trillion-dollar companies. The other faces inwards, creating, updating and sharing – often for free – the basic software infrastructure and tools that make the digital world tick.
Open-source software – in which a developer releases the source code for a product and allows anyone else to re-use and remix it to their liking – is at the foundation of Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and all four of the largest web browsers. The encryption of a WhatsApp chat, the compression of a Spotify stream and the format of a saved screenshot are all controlled by open-source code.
