Meta creates ‘Business AI’ group led by ex-Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih

Meta has hired the former CEO of Salesforce AI, Clara Shih, to lead a new “Business AI” group.

Salesforce has still not publicly acknowledged .

“Meta’s Llama models have over 600M downloads to date, and Meta AI has more than 500M monthly actives,” Shih said.

From the start, Meta has made the Llama models available to other enterprises under a license it describes as “open source,” but the creation of the new business group makes clear that Meta’s interest is commercial, not philanthropic.

Meta’s licenses and its acceptable use policy contain numerous restrictions on how enterprises may use the models, flying in the face of traditional definitions of open source software and in particular of the new .

Meta also has a veto on competitors using Llama for anything too big: The Llama 3.2 license also requires that enterprises offering services to more than 700 million monthly active users must request an additional license from Meta, “which Meta may grant … in its sole discretion” and may not use the software until Meta expressly allows it.

Since Meta licenses each of its AI models separately there’s nothing stopping it from lowering that threshold for future versions to bring more applications for the software under its control or demanding financial compensation for broader usage licenses.

Full circle

Finding ways to make money from business AI is clearly on Shih’s to-do list: In .

“The past four years at Salesforce have been some of the most rewarding in my career,” but “There was only one call I knew I would answer, and it was Meta’s,” she said in the post. “Today truly feels like a full-circle moment.”