In the high stakes, brutally competitive AI race, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been an outlier. While most of the big foundation model players tightly guard their methods and charge fees for using their service, Meta’s offerings under the Llama umbrella are free and mostly open source, so almost anybody can experiment with them.

That strategy has helped Meta quickly catch up to an early lead gained by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, and established it as a guiding light for those in the industry who feel open research is the right path for the development of AI.

There’s another contributing factor to Meta’s against-the-grain approach, which has gone mostly unnoticed, even inside the company: Its Facebook AI Research lab, responsible for Llama and other breakthroughs, is made up largely of women. Around 60% of its leadership team are women and some reporting chains, according to interviews with people inside the organization, are female from top to bottom.