Over the last couple of weeks, it has been a battle of chatbots amongst behemoth tech companies including Microsoft (BING), Google (BARD), OpenAI (ChatGPT) and now Meta has launched its very own Language Model Meta AI called LLaMA.
Meta describes LLaMA as “a state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI.”
“To maintain integrity and prevent misuse, we are releasing our model under a noncommercial license focused on research use cases. Access to the model will be granted on a case-by-case basis to academic researchers; those affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia; and industry research laboratories around the world,” Meta wrote in a blog post.
How is LLaMA Different?
Well, unlike OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, LLaMA is not essentially a chatbot but a research tool that Meta believes will solve issues regarding AI language models.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also took to Facebook to announce the launch of LLaMA, “To help researchers advance their work. LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures. Meta is committed to this open model of research and we’ll make our new model available to the AI research community.”
LLaMA also boasts of having a collection of language models that range from 7B to 65B parameters and the Meta says that it trains models on trillions of tokens, claiming that it can train state-of-the-art models with the use of public datasets without relying on proprietary data sets.
“Smaller, more performant models such as LLaMA enable others in the research community who don’t have access to large amounts of infrastructure to study these models, further democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field,” said Meta in its official blog.
Meta is yet to make LLaMA available for use in any of its products but plans to make it available to researchers. And although the company recently launched its LLM OPT-175B, LLaMA is seemingly a more advanced AI.
The company has also made the LLaMA model source code available to researchers who wish to see and know how the system works. “By sharing the code for LLaMA, other researchers can more easily test new approaches to limiting or eliminating these problems in large language models,” Meta wrote in a blog post.
Futuristic experiences
Zuckerberg also announced that the company is, “Creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area.”
He adds that Meta will kick things off by, “Pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology into all of our different products.”
Meta will focus on “building creative and expressive tools” in the short term and will “focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways over the long term.”
According to Zuckerberg, there’s a ton of work to do as the company is currently exploring experiences with text for WhatsApp, Messenger and images for Instagram which could pave the way for “video and multi-modal experiences.”
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
