Meta has finally hopped onto the AI bandwagon with the announcement of making its AI chatbot Llama 2 available for commercial use. The chatbot will be available through partnerships with major cloud providers such as Microsoft. Llama 2 will be a direct rival to ChatGPT and Google’s BARD. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that they will be partnering with Microsoft to introduce the next version of its AI language model, Llama 2. Meta used the acronym LLaMA, for Large Language Model Meta AI, to describe the first version of its model, announced in February. It’s now dropped the capital letters for its second version, Llama 2.
Unlike ChatGPT and BARD, this chatbot will be available for free for research and commercial use.
The new Llama has been built on 40 percent more data than its predecessor, with more than one million annotations by humans to fine-tune the quality of its outputs, Zuckerberg said.
“Llama 2 outperforms other open source language models on many external benchmarks, including reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests,” the firm says.
“We’ve been blown away by the huge demand for Llama 1 from researchers — with more than 100,000 requests for access to the large language model — and the amazing things they’ve achieved by building on top of it. We’re now ready to open source the next version of Llama 2 and are making it available free of charge for research and commercial use,” said the firm in a blog post.
Microsoft, on their part will make Llama 2 available through its Azure catalog so that it can be used with other cloud tools such as content filtering and safety filters. The tool will be able to run directly on Windows PCs and other providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Hugging Face among others.
Meta has also tried to distinguish itself by being more open than some of its Big Tech rivals about offering a peek at the data and code it uses to build AI systems.
“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we’re open sourcing Llama 2,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
Microsoft is also a funder and partner of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. However, neither ChatGPT nor any other similar offerings from Microsoft or Google are open source. With this deal, Microsoft has sent the message clearly that it isn’t an OpenAI only developer in terms of Gen AI.
“We are launching a challenge to encourage a diverse set of public, non-profit, and for-profit entities to use Llama 2 to address environmental, education and other important challenges. The challenge rules will be available prior to the start of it,” Meta said in a blog.