But there is at least one subject on which Musk can see eye to eye with Zuckerberg.
On Tuesday, Musk offered a rare compliment to Zuckerberg after Meta released its latest AI model, Llama 3.1. The model, which Meta claims is able to outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4o, is open source and has been made available for the public to use for free.
“It is impressive and Zuck does deserve credit for open-sourcing,” Musk said in response to an X post on the model from former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy on Tuesday.
Representatives at Meta for Zuckerberg didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
It is impressive and Zuck does deserve credit for open-sourcing
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2024
Both Zuckerberg and Musk haven’t hidden their ambitions to dominate the AI space. Back in January, Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge that Meta had been stockpiling AI chips from Nvidia.
“We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company. I think a lot of people may not appreciate that,” Zuckerberg told the outlet.
Likewise for Musk, whose AI startup xAI said it raised $6 billion during their Series B funding round in May.
Musk’s motivations for starting xAI stemmed in part from his disagreements with his cofounders at OpenAI. The mercurial billionaire cofounded OpenAI with its current CEO Sam Altman in 2015 but left the company’s board in 2018.
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“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” Musk wrote in an X post in February 2023. “Not what I intended at all.”
That view was echoed by Zuckerberg, who outlined a similar ethos in a company blog post he published on Tuesday.
“I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives,” he added. “I think governments will conclude it’s in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer.”