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Paris: Open-source development of artificial intelligence models could power economic growth and reduce risks from the technology, the head of the non-profit behind the Firefox web browser said Monday at the Paris AI summit.
Hailed by some big tech players as a key to AI success and shunned by others for undermining competitive advantage, open source refers to software makers sharing freely the inner workings of their systems so others can build on and adapt them.
"Small companies, governments, they all need to make AI safe. Us all having a toolkit, a Lego box, to do that freely, cheaply, in a robust way, that's going to help everybody go faster," Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, told AFP inside the Grand Palais summit venue.
In the past developers could simply share the source code of their software programmes with potential collaborators.
That was the case with projects such as Firefox or the Linux operating system that powers much of the internet.
But AI presents new challenges for the open source movement as more ingredients go into a complete system.
Today's AI "models" require vast amounts of data to train, producing "weights" that help define their responses to user requests.
Companies such as Facebook owner Meta or Chinese startup DeepSeek, which have trumpeted their open-source AI credentials, often fail to share the complete "stack" of these ingredients with others.
Nevertheless, "things that are even a little bit open -- we would like to see them even more open -- are starting to make it possible for the global AI community to collaborate on making AI better and more accessible," Surman said.
"There's layers of data, layers of the models, but still the same principles that we can collaborate to create something, to go faster."
He pointed to a 2024 Harvard Business School paper that estimated $4 billion worth of work went into developing past generations of open source tools.
But those tools went on to create almost $9 trillion in value.
"There's a real interest in open source being the same in the AI era as it was in the previous era of the internet, just because it helps everybody go faster and, you know, make more money and have more impact," Surman said.
"It's the idea of building blocks that anyone can create AI from freely, creatively, without asking permission or paying a big price".
