The future of LLMs is open source, Salesforce's Benioff says

Cheaper, open source AI will commoditize the market at expense of their bloated counterparts

The future of large language models is likely to be open source, according to Marc Benioff, co-founder and longstanding CEO of Salesforce.

Despite the hype around LLM builders — OpenAI sucked in $40 billion in capital at a nominal $300 billion valuation in February — he predicts the market will soon become commoditized for application builders wanting to plug-and-play their word juggling capabilities, with open source models likely to play a central role.

"AI has got to where it is, over the last two decades, through open source. Salesforce is a huge contributor to the body of work, including the prompt engineering and other critical parts of these model technologies. Open source has made all of this possible. It is the driver of the innovation," Benioff told the Financial Times.

He highlighted China's DeepSeek — which crashed AI market valuations when it launched its R1 model in January — saying it would create fundamental transformation in the market because it is open source under the MIT license, meaning application developers can embed it in their products at a much lower cost than alternative LLMs, including OpenAI, Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama 2*.

"[DeepSeek is] basically free, and you can put it in your product. And Salesforce, for example, could easily do this and reduce our cost of using our model by 90 percent because they came up with very innovative new ways to deploy models that will save companies billions," he said.

"The current commercialized models had not come up with these approaches. They were moving to these. It's a transformation from a technical model called transformer to another technical model called MOE [mixture of experts] that's like, 'Wow, if we do this, we're going to save a lot of money'," he added.

Benioff argues that DeepSeek's launch is forcing other AI companies to look at their own open source model. "A lot of this magic and capability is available for free in open source. And so you're right when you say, 'Hey, don't you think that these companies should be worried about this or that piece?' But at one level, they offer an open source-capable platform that's maybe interchangeable. At another, they offer a consumer service that's branded," he said.

It is not Salesforce's first time working with AI. In 2017, it announced a partnership with IBM's Watson to beef up the CRM vendor's Einstein offering, an arrangement that was expanded in 2024.

Salesforce has backed some open source projects. In June last year, it got behind the Polaris data catalogue initiative from Apache, to aid data sharing across platform boundaries.

Benioff has been a vocal critic of Microsoft in the past. In September last year, he dubbed Copilot — the Redmond giant's efforts to build tools on OpenAI's ChatGPT — as Clippy 2.0 (02:30 in the video) in reference to the much derided Office assistant.

This week he doubled down on the attack:

"Microsoft is just a ChatGPT reseller. That's their AI strategy at its very core. They've become very frustrated with that. So they hired Mustafa Suleyman, Demis's partner in DeepMind, to run a new Microsoft AI division, to build a new model, which is part of their Prometheus program. This idea that they're going to have their own models, and not going to have ChatGPT at the heart of Copilot," Benioff said.

The Register has reported on Microsoft's shifting plan, noting the development of a line of permissively licensed small language models under the Phi codename.

While these open models are minuscule compared with OpenAI's proprietary product, they are appropriate for use on edge devices and are generally quite competent given their size.

In March, Gartner predicted that LLM giants could be on the cusp of an extinction phase. It seems Benioff is happy to help out by lobbing the odd asteroid in the direction of the dinosaurs.

Bootenote

Meta markets Llama 2 as open source yet it is not fully compliant with the Open Source Initiative definition. ®