Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says that AI model Llama 3.1 is the world’s biggest and most capable openly available foundation model “ that competes with commercial products like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
One of the greatest AI models is being offered for free by Meta. The business unveiled Llama 3.1, the most advanced iteration of a big language model, on Tuesday. The state-of-the-art artificial intelligence model is readily accessible to everyone as it is free of cost and open source.
In an open letter published on Tuesday, CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that by making the most recent AI model “open source,” his firm is adopting a “different approach.” “We are proactively forming alliances to enable additional businesses within the network to provide distinctive features to their clientele.”
Llama3.1, according to Facebook’s parent company Meta, is the “world’s largest and most capable openly available foundation model,” competing with for-profit products from businesses like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. There are 405 billion parameters, or adjustable elements, in the latest edition of Llama.
Two scaled-down versions of Llama 3, one with 70 billion parameters and the other with 8 billion, have already been made available by Meta. Additionally, Llama 3.1-branded updated versions of these phones were issued by Meta.
“Llama 3.1 405B is the first openly available model that rivals the top AI models when it comes to state-of-the-art capabilities in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use, and multilingual translation,” Zuckerberg said, detailing the AI model.
But unlike OpenAI and Google’s latest models, Llama is not “multimodal,” meaning it is not built to handle images, audio, and video. Meta, however, says the model is significantly better at using other software such as a web browser.
The announcement also underscores Meta’s close relationship with Nvidia, which is a key partner and is providing Facebook’s parent company with computing chips called GPUs to help train its AI models, including the latest version of Llama.
With the release of Llama 3.1, Meta once again hit out at the industry, showing that the closed approach to developing AI at scale may not be the right way to go. But this also shows that Meta is at the center of the debate over the dangers posed by releasing AI without controls and safeguards.
But Meta is relying a lot on open-source, which might cost the business billions of dollars. However, Meta can do so because of the vast array of resources that the company has at its disposal to create and implement AI models on a large scale. Most sophisticated models are kept confidential by Google and OpenAI.
In his letter, Zuckerberg stated, “I think AI will develop similarly.” Many tech companies are currently creating industry-leading closed models. However, open source is catching up swiftly.