How Mark Zuckerberg went all-in to make Meta a major AI player and threaten OpenAI’s dominance | Fortune

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# How Mark Zuckerberg has fully rebuilt Meta around Llama

![Sharon Goldman](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Sharon-Goldman-1.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100)

By
[Sharon Goldman](https://fortune.com/author/sharon-goldman/)
Sharon Goldman

AI Reporter
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![Sharon Goldman](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Sharon-Goldman-1.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100)

By
[Sharon Goldman](https://fortune.com/author/sharon-goldman/)
Sharon Goldman

AI Reporter
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November 19, 2024, 5:30 AM ET

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![Zuckerberg has pushed Meta to build Llama into all its products and services, including its Orion augmented reality glasses now in prototype stage.](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/GettyImages-2173579471_eb96f3-e1731698916798.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100)

Zuckerberg has pushed Meta to build Llama into all its products and services, including its Orion augmented reality glasses now in prototype stage.David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images

It was the summer of 2023, and the question at hand was whether to release a Llama into the wild.

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The Llama in question wasn’t an animal: Llama 2 was the follow-up release of Meta’s generative AI model—a would-be challenger to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The first Llama had come out a few months earlier. It had originally been intended only for researchers, but after it leaked online, it caught on with developers, who loved that it was free—unlike the large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, [Google](https://fortune.com/company/alphabet/), and Anthropic—as well as state-of-the-art. Also unlike those rivals, [it was open source](https://fortune.com/2023/07/18/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-open-source-llama-2-llm/), which meant researchers, developers, and other users could access the underlying code and its “weights” (which determine how the model processes information) to use, modify, or improve it.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, and Joelle Pineau, VP of AI research and head of Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team, wanted to give Llama 2 a wide open-source release. They felt strongly that open-sourcing Llama 2 would enable the model to become more powerful more quickly, at a lower cost. It could help the company catch up in a generative AI race in which it was seen as lagging badly behind its rivals, even as the company struggled to r

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