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

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 ...