Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, has taken a bold step into Artificial Intelligence (AI) by launching its new AI system known as Llama 2. This AI system aims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard but offers something different — it will be freely accessible.
The new initiative by Meta empowers businesses and entrepreneurs to compete with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard without having to bear high costs. Microsoft will deliver Llama 2 via its Azure cloud platform in a strategic partnership. In this alliance, Microsoft has been dubbed Meta’s “preferred partner.”
Llama 2 is a part of Meta’s Large Language Model (LLM) series, the same foundational technology that drives ChatGPT and other AI generative products.
Meta’s Approach to Democratizing AI Technology
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced this technology’s distribution for research and commercial applications, underlining the company’s dedication to fostering innovation and openness.
Breaking away from the norm followed by other tech giants, Meta has adopted a more transparent approach regarding the data and code utilized in developing its AI systems. Zuckerberg champions open-source models as they encourage innovation and strengthen safety and security measures. Llama 2 has been open-sourced by Meta, following the company’s history of open-sourcing AI work, such as the popular machine-learning framework PyTorch.
However, the research paper revealing Llama 2 lacks the level of transparency seen in Meta’s previous work, omitting detailed information about the training data. This model has been trained using diverse public data, explicitly excluding data from Meta’s products and services. It’s noteworthy that data containing significant personal information from websites was eliminated.
While Meta will offer direct downloads of its AI models or deliver them via Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, it confirmed that these models would be accessible through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other platforms. The specifics regarding the financial aspects of this partnership remain undisclosed, even though Microsoft, a significant investor and partner of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), is designated as a “preferred partner.”
In a concurrent announcement at the Inspire event, Microsoft revealed it would charge businesses $30 per user per month for its generative AI tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot, alongside the introduction of Llama 2.
