How Mark Zuckerberg has rebuilt Meta around Llama, pivoting the whole company towards generative AI

And why I spent nearly two months tackling a story about a furry camelid

Hi there, it’s been a while - I started a new role covering AI at Fortune at the end of March and the past eight months have flown by in a flash!

I’m really enjoying the new gig: You’ll certainly notice that Fortune has a paywall, which I get a lot of complaints about. Look, it’s a tough media landscape out there and just like folks pay for Substacks (I do!), I think a Fortune subscription is well-worth it (I had a Fortune subscription before starting!). So I hope you’ll consider it and follow me there!

I just tackled my biggest story for Fortune thus far. Back in August, I had a meeting with Ahmad Al-Dahle, head of generative AI at Meta, as well as one of Meta’s top PR folks. I told them that I really wanted to tell the story of Meta’s Llama - and how its ultimate release as an “open source” — Ok, not fully open, but open weights — marked a crucial crossroads for Meta and Zuckerberg—the beginning of a remarkable comeback after a company low point in the Fall of 2022, and now threatening the generative AI dominance of OpenAI.

The biggest question I wanted to answer was why — why was Meta opening its generative AI tech and essentially giving it away to developers for free? The strategy can seem counterintuitive, coming from a company with $135 billion in annual revenue. Open-source software has typically been seen as a way to democratize technology to the advantage of small startups or under-resourced teams— the kinds scrambling to compete with giants like Meta.

I also told Meta that I wanted to speak to the top leaders involved with Llama - from Al-Dahle and VP of Research/Head of FAIR Joelle Pineau to Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun and yes…I wanted to speak to Mark Zuckerberg.

I did not get to speak to Zuck by the time my story published this week - perhaps he was too busy recording rap songs with T-Pain or sailing on his yacht in Tahiti. But I had great chats with LeCun, Al-Dahle and Pineau, as well as Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg. Combined with interviews with academics, analysts, partners and developers, I came away with a fascinating deep-dive story that built on previous pieces I had written about Meta’s Llama for VentureBeat - like this one from the end of 2023 where I laid out my case for why Llama was really last year’s AI winner - not ChatGPT.

Anyway, I hope you’ll check out this piece, which is online and will also appear in Fortune’s December/January print edition: How Mark Zuckerberg Transformed Meta into an AI Powerhouse

Some of what I tackle in the piece:

• Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to open-source Llama 2, defying concerns over monetization and misuse. An open-source Llama was positioned as a strategic advantage, enabling rapid innovation and attracting developers.

• Did you know that Meta released a gen AI chatbot, Galactica, just 12 days before ChatGPT was released in November 2022? It didn’t go very well.

• Llama models now power a range of Meta products, including AI assistants across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. They have been downloaded over 600 million times on sites like Hugging Face.

• Zuckerberg himself has been pivotal in Meta’s AI transition, spearheading recruitment efforts and rallying internal teams around AI development.

• Critics argue that Llama is *not* open source, but simply “open weights” - the data is still behind closed doors — while others have raised concern over potential misuse of open-source models, particularly in sensitive geopolitical contexts.

• Meta is taking a big financial gamble by investing heavily in AI, with projected capital expenditures reaching $40 billion in 2024. Analysts remain optimistic but warn that investor patience may wane without clear revenue growth by 2026.

The bottom line, I discovered, is that the kind of gamble Meta is taking, with its massive investment in GPUs and all things generative AI, requires a leader willing to take big swings. And Meta has not only that leader, but a massively profitable core business to fund the vision. As a result, Meta is back at the center of the most important conversation at the intersection of tech and business—and it’s not a conversation about legless metaverse avatars.