Free AI from Silicon Valley's clingy hands, says Nick Clegg

Sir Nick Clegg wants AI tools to be widely and freely available. Photo: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) must be freed from the «sticky hands» of Silicon Valley, Facebook's Sir Nick Clegg has said, as the tech giant seeks to counter the rise of ChatGPT OpenAI.

The former deputy prime minister, who now serves as global president of Facebook owner Meta and a key adviser to Mark Zuckerberg, said artificial intelligence tools needed to be made widely and freely available rather than controlled by a handful of US tech giants.

Meta insists on “open sourcing” its AI tools, meaning making them publicly available to other developers. Currently, most competing AI tools are a black box with little detail about how they are built and work.

Some experts have expressed concerns that the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools could lead to the spread of powerful technologies to potential attackers.

However, speaking at a Meta event in London on Tuesday, Sir Nick said it was important to “democratize” the technology “so that it is not just kept in the clingy hands of a small number of very large and wealthy companies in California.”< Sir Nick added that many countries no "tens of billions of dollars" to build artificial intelligence data centers.

He said Meta was in talks with African leaders about how they could do this. benefit from your technology.