Mark Zuckerberg has an unusual plan for winning the artificial-intelligence race: giving away his company’s technology free betting that providing the hottest new technology free will drive down competitors’ prices and spread Meta’s version of AI more broadly, giving Zuckerberg more control over the way people interact with machines in the future… Meta felt the cost of not controlling its own destiny when Apple decided in 2021 to cut off its ability to gather data on their users without asking for permission—something Meta had relied on to target ads. The company said it took a hit of more than $10 billion in revenue in 2022 as a direct result. The company’s stock swooned 26%.

For the AI-giveaway strategy to work, Meta must get its billions of users to look to those free AI services in the same way they flocked to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It wagers that advertising can come later, as it did in the past. Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into ad dollars is well established…

Meta in April 2024 released its most recent generative AI tool—dubbed Llama 3—free for any company to use and repurpose so long as they have fewer than 700 million users. And it integrated chatbots based on Llama 3 into Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and on the web.  “All of our properties are free, we help people connect with each other, and we want to help connect people with AIs that can help them get things done,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s always been our playbook. That’s what the company ethos is about…

Excerpts from Excepts from Salvador Rodriguez, Facebook Parent’s Plan to Win AI Race: Give Its Tech Away Free, WSJ May 19, 2024