It is rapidly emerging as one of the most important technological, and increasingly ideological, divides of our times: Should powerful generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems be open or closed? How that debate plays out will affect the productivity of our economies, the stability of our societies and the fortunes of some of the world’s richest companies.

Supporters of open-source models, such as Meta’s LLaMA 2 or Hugging Face’s Bloom that enable users to customise powerful generative AI software themselves, say they broaden access to the technology, stimulate innovation and improve reliability by encouraging outside scrutiny.