Elon Musk finally lauds Mark Zuckerberg in a rare exchange

Elon Musk praises Mark Zuckerberg for open-sourcing Meta's latest AI model, Llama 3.1, despite their past disagreements.

Elon Musk finally sits on the same page with Mark Zuckerberg, as he is ready to give some “credit” to the latter.

Musk and Zuckerberg put aside their differences to agree on the importance of open-source AI (File)

Musk and Zuckerberg have often been at odds, with the Tesla boss frequently taking jabs at Zuckerberg and even challenging him to a boxing match after Meta launched Threads to compete with X. However, there is one area where the two tech moguls find common ground: artificial intelligence.

On Tuesday, Musk complimented Zuckerberg following the release of Meta's latest AI model, Llama 3.1. Meta claims that this model outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4 and has made it open-source, allowing the public to use it for free.

In response to a post on X by former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy, Musk said, “It is impressive, and Zuck does deserve credit for open-sourcing.”

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg find common ground in AI

Both Zuckerberg and Musk have clear ambitions to dominate the AI space. In January, Zuckerberg mentioned in an interview with The Verge that Meta had been accumulating AI chips from Nvidia, stating, “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.”

Similarly, Musk's AI startup, xAI, raised $6 billion during its Series B funding round in May. Musk’s decision to start xAI partly stemmed from his disagreements with his cofounders at OpenAI. He co-founded OpenAI with current CEO Sam Altman in 2015 but left the company's board in 2018.

Musk expressed his frustration in a post on X in February 2023, writing, “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. Not what I intended at all.”

Zuckerberg shares a similar ethos regarding open-source AI: “I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future.”

He further wrote in a company blog, “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.”