Zuckerberg signals Meta won’t open source all of its ‘superintelligence’ AI models

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision on Wednesday for “personal superintelligence,” the idea that people should be able to use AI to achieve their personal goals. 

Smuggled into the letter is a signal that Meta is shifting how it plans to release AI models as it pursues “superintelligence.”

“We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible,” wrote Zuckerberg. “That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.”

That wording about open source is significant. Zuckerberg has historically positioned Meta’s Llama family of open models as the company’s key differentiator from competitors like OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Meta’s goal has been to create open AI models that were as good as or better than those closed models. In a 2024 letter, Zuckerberg wrote, “Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry.”

And while many say Llama doesn’t fit the strict definition of open source AI — partly because Meta hasn’t released its massive training datasets — Zuckerberg’s words point to a possible change in priority: Open source may no longer be the default for Meta’s cutting-edge AI. 

There’s a reason why Meta’s rivals keep their models closed. Closed models give companies more control over monetizing their products. Zuckerberg pointed out last year that Meta’s business isn’t reliant on selling access to AI models, so “releasing Llama doesn’t undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers.”  Meta, of course, makes most of its money from selling internet advertising.

Still, that stated viewpoint on open models was before Meta started to feel like it was falling behind competitors, and executives became obsessed with beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 model while developing Llama 3. 

Cut to June 2025, when Meta began its public AGI sprint in earnest by investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI, acquiring Scale’s founder and CEO, and restructuring its AI efforts under a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta has spent billions of dollars to acquire researchers and engineers from top AI firms and build out new data centers. 

Recent reports indicate that all that investment has led Meta to pause testing on its latest Llama model, Behemoth, and instead focus efforts on developing a closed model. 

With Zuckerberg’s mission for introducing “personal superintelligence” to the world — a decided shift from the rivals he says are working on “automating all valuable work” — his AI monetization strategy is taking shape. It’s clear from Zuckerberg’s words today that Meta plans to deliver “personal superintelligence” through its own products like augmented reality glasses and virtual reality headsets. 

“Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices,” Zuckerberg wrote in Wednesday’s letter. 

When asked about Meta potentially keeping its most advanced models closed, a Meta spokesperson said that the company remains committed to open source AI and said it also expects to train closed source models in the future.

“Our position on open source AI is unchanged,” a spokesperson said. “We plan to continue releasing leading open source models. We haven’t released everything we’ve developed historically and we expect to continue training a mix of open and closed models going forward.”