Switzerland’s open-source rules and Google’s privacy plans lead the Index

Welcome to ZDNET’s Innovation Index, which identifies the most innovative developments in tech from the past week and ranks the top four, based on votes from our panel of editors and experts. Our mission is to help you identify the trends that will have the biggest impact on the future.

Despite being all over the map, many of this week’s trends bring open-source software to the forefront. 

In first place is Switzerland’s requirement that all government software must be open source. Unless restricted by security concerns, the new law requires every public sector organization to share the source code of any software developed by or for them. The mandate’s goal is to set an example for transparency and security at the government level — a priority the US hasn’t really embraced. While European nations are regularly ahead of the US in terms of software responsibility, we’ll have to see if Switzerland’s new standard impacts governments globally moving forward. 

After much waffling, Google comes in at #2 this week with its decision not to restrict third-party cookies in Chrome. On its face, the move appears to undercut user privacy, but the company opted instead to promote tools that give users a bit more control for managing how their activity is tracked. The catch — because, of course, there is one — is that improved performance of these tools would rely on wider adoption, putting the onus of implementation back on, well, entities that aren’t Google. While other browsers have simply blocked third-party cookies by default, Google’s approach splits the difference between the concerns of surveilled users and the interests of advertisers who rely on revenue. 

In third place is Apple, which released DCLM-Baseline-7B, a seven-billion-parameter language model designed as part of an initiative that improves training dataset quality. Most notably, however, is that it’s open-source — a factor that allows any researcher or developer to reap the benefits of the powerful model and move the whole industry forward. After a slower start in the AI race, Apple’s tortoise-style approach may be paying off in reliability and quality. 

Closing out the week is Meta, a company that’s also toying with open-source models — sort of. The company launched the hefty LLaMA 3.1 405B (that’s 405 billion parameters), which will power Meta AI assistant. But it turns out the pro-open-source language Zuckerberg laced the launch with was all talk (sorry, indie developers). It’s still to be seen how ongoing shifts in the open-source space, especially from competitors, will influence Meta’s strategic future.