Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been developing various competitive AI chatbots and assistants that its users can integrate and benefit from.
Meta has shocked the entire AI fraternity with its recent announcement. The parent company of Facebook is giving away what it claims is the world’s most capable large language model AI. Mark Zuckerberg has posted a video on Instagram declaring the same and adding much more to tease his global AI consumer base.
Mark also wrote an open letter on Tuesday, saying that his company is approaching the AI model release differently. Llama 3.1 will be released for free worldwide and will be kept completely open-source to help create a collaborative ecosystem rather than a cutthroat one. He said, “We’re actively building partnerships so that more companies in the ecosystem can offer unique functionality to their customers as well.”
Meta says that Llama 3.1 will continue the legacy of keeping its AI models mostly free and built on an open foundation model. Llama 3.1 has already surpassed the industry benchmarks in an independent test conducted among other existing LLM AI chatbots. Meta's latest offering is trained on 405 billion parameters, much higher than any existing model in the market. The smaller versions of Llama 3 are trained on 70 billion and 8 billion parameters. The smaller upgraded versions have already been released, branded as Llama 3.1.
“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,” Meta said, detailing the soon-to-be-launched AI model. Meta has not yet confirmed the official launch date of Llama 3.1, but it will surely surprise the entire AI community.
Meta’s close relationship with Nvidia plays a major role in bringing Facebook’s parent company to a leadership stance in the AI industry. The availability of advanced semiconductor chips that power Llama AI’s latest version will provide a competitive edge to the tech giant in gaining performance-based traction. But, Llama 3.1 comes with its limitations. It currently provides text-based outputs and does not handle images, audio, and video. For these tasks, Meta is planning to launch dedicated apps, which might also be free of cost.
