Mark Zuckerberg Makes AI Technology Free—Is It a Bid to Win the AI Race?

Mark Zuckerberg, the man behind Facebook and CEO of Meta, is making some of the tech giant's artificial intelligence free as a way of potentially winning the AI race, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

According to sources, the somewhat retrograde strategy is intended to force competitors to reduce their prices by making technology freely available. This will increase the use of Meta's artificial intelligence and give Zuckerberg greater control over how people will interact with machines in the future.

FRANCE-TECHNOLOGY-IT-FAIR-VIVATECH — A visitor watches a Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg speech on a screen at the Meta booth during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, on June 14, 2023. ALAIN JOCARD/AFP via Getty Images

(Photo: ALAIN JOCARD/AFP via Getty Images) A visitor watches a Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg speech on a screen at the Meta booth during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 14, 2023.

Like many of its rivals, Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms is spending billions of dollars on highly qualified computers, the best computer chips, scientists, and gigawatts of electricity to develop the most powerful AI tools.

In contrast to some of those competitors, Zuckerberg shared the results of that investment—Meta's most sophisticated chatbots and the technology that powers them—last week.

For the AI giveaway strategy to succeed, Meta needs to persuade its billions of consumers to look to those free AI apps in the same manner that they went to Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

It wagers that, as in the past, advertising may arrive later. Despite conflicting initial user feedback on its AI services, Meta has a well-established ability to convert web traffic into advertising revenue.

Google in the AI Race

The AI race only intensifies, with several tech giants already employing the new technology in many products.

In its recently concluded I/O event, Google saw the introduction of AI Overviews in the dominant search engine. Users should be able to quickly obtain a topic summary and pertinent links for additional research with AI Overviews.

According to Google, this feature has already undergone a thorough testing process through Search Labs and has received excellent consumer feedback for being convenient and effective in offering thorough information. All users in the United States will now have access to AI Overviews, and additional countries will gradually receive this service.

According to the internet giant, AI Overviews can increase user interaction with a wider breadth of material by broadening the range of websites visited for more complex topics.

Furthermore, thanks to Google's proprietary Gemini model, AI Overviews can now handle more complicated queries with multi-step reasoning. Rather than breaking up inquiries into several searches, users can now ask complex questions that cover a range of subtleties and details in a single search request.

OpenAI's Recent AI Collaborations

Recently, OpenAI and Reddit collaborated to highlight content and features across the two firms' products. This allowed ChatGPT to highlight Reddit material and Reddit to provide new AI tools for its users.

Reddit distributes its material through an application programming interface, which ChatGPT and other OpenAI products will use with this new partnership. The company declared that OpenAI will work with Reddit on advertising as well.

OpenAI can use partner data to train AI systems and display Reddit content by agreement. Reddit will also provide its users access to new AI-powered tools based on OpenAI models and show ads on its partner's website.