From: hu-po
Meta (formerly Facebook) is recognized as a significant contributor to the open source AI community. The company is currently “killing it in the open source world” and is considered “the open source AI company” [00:02:32], [00:02:35].
Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2)
A prime example of Meta’s commitment to open source is the release of Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) [00:02:38]. This segmentation model, the successor to the original Segment Anything Model, was released as an open source project [00:03:32]. Meta made the work available under permissive open licenses [01:18:31].
Key Aspects of SAM 2’s Open Source Release
- Availability: SAM 2 is publicly available, allowing integration into various video editing tools and applications like Runway ML and Snapchat [01:28:00], [01:28:10].
- Community Contributions: The open-source nature means Meta does not need to perform all optimization tasks themselves. The community can distill and quantize models like SAM 2, leading to faster and more efficient versions [01:24:44], [01:25:05]. This collaborative approach benefits everyone [01:25:07], [01:25:10].
- Data vs. Code: While Meta provides the model’s code and training scripts through its open source releases, internal training data is typically not shared due to licensing or proprietary reasons [01:16:16], [01:41:19], [01:41:26]. However, the release of algorithms and detailed papers is still highly valued by the community [01:41:35], [01:41:38].
Meta is regarded as a “good guy” for releasing such advanced models for public use [01:27:57].