To say Meta’s attempts to become a leader in AI have thus far fallen short would be like calling Mount Everest a short hike. But the company is pot-committed to the project, with plans to spend more than $600 billion earmarked for AI, so it might as well keep going. According to Axios, the company is finally on the precipice of making its latest models public, and they’ll be available via open-source licensing in the future.
Per the report, the new models will be the first released by Meta under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the founder of training data giant Scale AI, which was acquired by Zuckerberg’s company to try to juice its underperforming AI models. While the new releases will reportedly maintain some proprietary parts for alleged safety purposes, the company apparently plans to open-source the models, likely offering licensing agreements to firms that want to use the model instead of going full black box, like many of its competitors.
The theory is probably sound for Meta. AI coding giant Cursor recently revealed that it was using the open source model Kimi 2.5, released by Moonshot AI, as the basis for its Composer 2 model. Given how costly it is to train a model from scratch, it seems likely that more operations will take this approach in the future. Meta would be the biggest player in the frontier model market to offer an open-source option, which seems like a much simpler business model than the subscription approach that its competitors are leaning into.
The biggest hurdle still standing in front of Meta, though, is the possibility that its model still sucks. Meta has made its LLaMa models open source-ish (the company calls it open source, but its licensing process doesn’t align with any definition of those rights) and has pushed its AI products at every turn, but next to no one is actually using them. The company tried to make a splash with the release of LLaMa 4 last year, but it wildly underperformed expectations and failed to hit expected benchmarks.
Meta’s attempts to get back into the mix and compete with the top dogs in the space have been a pretty spectacular failure thus far. Despite throwing $100 million pay packages at big names in the AI space and undergoing seemingly endless restructurings, the company still can’t get it together. It was supposed to release a new model last month, but opted to delay that due to concerns that it is still underperforming. There were rumors that Zuckerberg and Wang were at odds because of issues behind the scenes. The fact that Wang is front and center in Axios’s report about Meta’s upcoming models suggests it may be time for him to sink or swim. If it falls short, he’ll likely be the fall guy. One thing is for certain: if anything goes wrong, Zuck definitely won’t be taking the blame.
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