[19th July 2023] Tech giants Meta and Microsoft teams up for the release of the commercial version of Meta’s open-source AI model Llama. The new model Llama 2 is trained on 40% more public data and can process twice as much content as its predecessor. Microsoft will aid in distributing Llama through its Azure cloud services, and will run on the Windows operating system.
Llama 2, previously offered to a few academics for research endeavors, will now be available through direct downloads and other platforms like Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face. “Open-source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open,” mentioned Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post.
The wider availability and free accessibility of the advanced Llama model present a significant challenge to existing players in the generative AI software market. Established companies, like OpenAI, supported by Microsoft, could face disruption. The original Llama model was already on par with ChatGPT and Bard chatbot, and the latest version has been trained on 40% more data, incorporating over 1 million human annotations, further enhancing the quality of its outputs.
However, Meta acknowledged that Llama 2's efficiency, compared to closed-source competitors like OpenAI's GPT-4, is still an area for further improvement. In one of its research papers, Meta candidly admitted that the closed-source alternatives boast certain advantages in terms of efficiency and optimization.
In response to its cloud competitors' moves, Microsoft plans to provide its business customers with a range of AI models to choose from. Amazon and Google have also expressed their intentions to offer access to their AI models, further intensifying the competition in the AI industry.
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