Why is Mark Zuckerberg giving away Meta’s crown jewels?

As alter egosAIAILLMAIGPT go, Augustus Caesar is not a bad one for Mark Zuckerberg, of Meta, owner of the Facebook family of apps. Both men started their march to power as teenagers. Both stopped at nothing to build empires—though unlike the impetuous Mr Zuckerberg, Augustus’s motto was “make haste slowly”. Both gave the illusion of sharing power (Augustus with the Senate, Mr Zuckerberg with shareholders) while wielding it almost absolutely. The Roman emperor is Mr Zuckerberg’s role model. In a recent podcast he used the 200-year era of stability ushered in by Augustus to illustrate why he is making Meta’s generative artificial-intelligence () models available in a way that, with some poetic licence, he calls open source.On July 23rd Mr Zuckerberg issued a manifesto laying out in greater detail the business case for open-source . That coincided with the release by Meta of Llama 3.1, a freely available large language model () whose most powerful version, it says, rivals the top offering from Open, maker of Chat. Mr Zuckerberg said Meta’s intent was to liberate itself from the sort of gatekeepers that have constrained it in the past, such as Apple and its iPhones. That sounds sensible. It was lost on no one, though, that Meta is Llama’s sole gatekeeper.