Photo: VCG

Plagiarism by an artificial intelligence (AI) team at Stanford University shows the need for open-source development of artificial intelligence, the CEO of the Chinese company whose work had been plagiarized said on Friday.

It shows that a continuous open source can bring positive benefits to the AI ecosystem, Li Dahai, CEO of ModelBest, said at the BAAI Conference held in Beijing on Friday.

A team from Stanford University announced Llama3-V on May 29, claiming it had comparable performance to GPT4-V and other models with the capability to be trained.

But netizens found evidence that the Llama3-V project code was reformatted and similar to MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, a large language model developed by ModelBest and Tsinghua University.

Two of the team members, Aksh Garg and Siddharth Sharma, reposted one netizen's query and apologized on Monday, while claiming that their role was to promote the model, and that they had been unable to contact the member who wrote the code for the project.

After the incident occurred in late May, enthusiastic community participants discovered it and exposed it, enabling such behavior to be corrected, Li said. This shows that an open source involves not only those who do the original work but also many participants who contribute needs and feedback, Li added.

Li also said this was an individual act carried out by a small team of students, and it does not represent the stance of Stanford University.