• All these predictions are taken from Forbes/Rob Toews' "10 AI Predictions For 2025".

• For the 2024 predictions you can find them here, and their resolution here.

• You can find all the markets under the tag [2025 Forbes AI predictions].

• Note that I will resolve to whatever Forbes/Rob Toews say in their resolution article for 2025's predictions, even if I or others disagree with his decision.

• I might bet in this market, as I have no power over the resolution.

Description of this prediction from the article:
Meta is the world’s standard bearer for open-weight AI. In a fascinating case study in corporate strategy, while rivals like OpenAI and Google have kept their frontier models closed source and charged for their use, Meta has chosen to give its state-of-the-art Llama models away for free.

So it will come as a surprise to many next year when Meta begins charging companies to use Llama.

To be clear: this is not to say that Meta will make Llama entirely closed source, nor that anyone who uses the Llama models will have to pay for them.

Instead, expect to see Meta make the terms of Llama’s open-source license more restrictive, such that companies who use Llama in commercial settings above a certain scale will need to start paying to access the models.

Technically, Meta already does a limited version of this today. The company does not allow the very largest companies—the cloud hyperscalers and other companies with more than 700 million monthly active users—to freely use its Llama models.

Back in 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “If you’re someone like Microsoft, Amazon or Google, and you’re going to basically be reselling [Llama], that’s something that we think we should get some portion of the revenue for. I don’t think that that’s going to be a large amount of revenue in the near-term, but over the long term, hopefully that can be something.”

Next year, Meta will substantially expand the set of organizations that must pay to use Llama to include many more large and mid-sized enterprises.

Why would Meta make this strategic pivot?

Keeping up with the LLM frontier is incredibly expensive. Meta will need to invest many billions of dollars every year if it wants Llama to stay at or near parity with the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others.

Meta is one of the world’s largest and most deep-pocketed companies. But it is also a publicly traded company that is ultimately answerable to its shareholders. As the cost of building frontier models skyrockets, it is increasingly untenable for Meta to devote such vast sums to train next-generation Llama models with zero expectation of revenue.

Hobbyists, academics, individual developers and startups will continue to be able to use the Llama models free of charge next year. But 2025 will be the year that Meta gets serious about monetizing Llama.