'Godfather Of AI' Yann LeCun Believes Open Source AI Models Will One Day Overtake Closed Source Rivals Like OpenAI's GPT

‘Godfather of AI' Yann LeCun thinks that Mistral AI's successful launch of its latest large-language model has set open-source AI models on the path to overtake proprietary ones from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and others.

What Happened: LeCun, Meta Platforms Inc.'s META chief AI scientist, thinks open-source models could drive the future of AI.

"Open source AI models are on a path to overtake proprietary models," LeCun said.

Open source AI models are on a path to overtake proprietary models. https://t.co/LPWVdjcfuD

— Yann LeCun (@ylecun) December 12, 2023

He was responding to a post highlighting the recent rise in open-source AI models, with the most recent success being Mistral AI's latest model.

Mistral AI is a French company that raised $415 million in its latest funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce Inc. CRM, among others. The six-month-old AI firm's valuation is estimated to be $2 billion.

See Also: It’s Not Just You, ChatGPT Has Indeed Become Lazier: OpenAI Says A Fix Is Coming

Mistral AI's massive fundraising comes after the firm launched its latest AI model, eclipsing the Microsoft Corp.-backed MSFT OpenAI's GPT 3.5 launched in Jan. 2023.

The Paris-based AI company released the results of a benchmark that shows its AI model beats Meta's Llama 2 as well as GPT 3.5 in several aspects.

This model is also more efficient and can be run locally on significantly less powerful resources – AI models are infamous for requiring extensive graphics power. Still, Mistral AI's model can run on computers without a GPU.

Moreover, Mistral AI's model has no guardrails whatsoever for users worried about censorship in AI models like GPT-4, Google's Gemini-powered Bard, and others.

For those who don't follow AI closely:
1) An open source model (free, anyone can download or modify) beats GPT-3.5
2) It has no safety guardrails
There are good things about this release, but also regulators, IT security experts, etc. should note the genie is out of the bottle. https://t.co/nHvlNKaItw

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) December 11, 2023

Why It Matters: With the AI revolution on a massive upward trajectory and companies like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL, Google increasingly resorting to closed-source AI models, the launch of a powerful and efficient open-source AI model is more important than ever before.

While Mistral AI still has a long way to go to catch up to OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, Google's Palm-2, and Anthropic's Claude 2, its recent success excites AI experts.

Check out more of Benzinga's Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.

Read Next: Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot Grok Accused Of Ripping Off OpenAI’s Codebase: ‘We Have A Lot In Common,’ Says ChatGPT Parent