Last week, a small group of top members of the lab, including Alexandr Wang, 28, Meta’s new chief AI officer, discussed abandoning the company’s most powerful open source AI model, called Behemoth, in favour of developing a closed model, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
For years, Meta has chosen to open-source its AI models, which means it makes the computer code public for other developers to build on. Closed models keep their underlying code private. Meta executives have long argued it is better for the technology to be built in public so that AI development will move faster and be accessible to more developers.
Any move toward a closed AI model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one. Meta has won plaudits from developers for open-sourcing its AI models, and one of its top AI executives, Yann LeCun, had said, “The platform that will win will be the open one.” This year, Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an advanced AI chatbot thanks in part to Meta’s open source code.
Meta had finished feeding in data to improve its Behemoth model, a process known as “training,” but has delayed its release because of poor internal performance, said the people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to discuss private conversations. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model — which is known as a “frontier” model — stopped running new tests on it, one of the people said.
The superintelligence lab’s discussions are preliminary, and no decisions have been made on potential changes, which would need sign-off from Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO. Meta could keep its open-source AI models while prioritizing a closed model. If these scenarios happen, they will be a significant shift for the company as it tries to stay competitive in the AI race against rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
