Can Anyone Compete With Meta’s New AI Model?

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What would you do if your competitor started offering a product that did exactly what yours did—for free? 

This isn’t a hypothetical scenario or founder’s nightmare. It is the cold, capitalist reality for AI model providers today and one with a long history in tech. The Internet Explorer web browser killed Marc Andreesen’s Netscape browser in 1998. Microsoft took Slack out behind the woodshed with Teams in 2019 and has far surpassed the former’s growth since then. And now, Mark Zuckerberg might do the same to OpenAI.

This week, Meta released the Llama 3.1 series of large language models. According to various benchmarks in areas such as math and reasoning, these models are sometimes superior and always competitive with offerings from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. To make it worse (at least, for OpenAI employee’s stock options), the model is open-source, making an important part of the AI tech stack free to use for enterprises.  

Llama’s new release is indicative of three truths:

1. An AI model is a remarkably poor product.
2. Open-source AI isn’t truly open-source if it relies on Meta’s good will.
3. If GPT-5 isn’t a banger, we are going to enter a rather extended AI winter.

Llama 3.1 is the most important AI model—open-source or otherwise—of the last year. I can think of no other category of technology, in the history of humanity, that has received AI’s level of funding, only to be potentially undercut by an entirely free offering.

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Become a paid subscriber to Every to learn about how:

• Meta's free Llama 3.1 threatens AI incumbents
• The real value lies in the AI ecosystem, not just the models
• Open-source AI's dependence on Meta raises sustainability concerns
• GPT-5's success is crucial for justifying massive AI investments