Tech giants Meta and Microsoft have teamed up to unveil Llama 2, a new open-source LLM that is now free for research and commercial use. Both companies believe that open collaboration is the best way to develop AI models, especially as the technology is rapidly advancing. Making these models available to the public enables everyone to use them.
Meta writes that Llama 2 will give, “Businesses, startups, entrepreneurs and researchers access to tools developed at a scale that would be challenging to build themselves.”
The Facebook parent company also says that it is safer to make the LLM publicly available as it’ll allow developers and researchers to test them, identify and solve problems as a community. “By seeing how these tools are used by others, our own teams can learn from them, improve those tools and fix vulnerabilities,” says Meta.
“We’re including model weights and starting code for the pre-trained model and conversational fine-tuned versions too.”
A partnership between two giants
Both Microsoft and Meta are expanding their longstanding partnership as the Threads company picks Microsoft as its preferred partner for Llama 2. “Llama 2 is available in the Azure AI model catalogue, enabling developers using Microsoft Azure to build with it and leverage their cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features.”
In light of their extended collaboration, Microsoft and Meta are jointly advocating an open approach to help businesses worldwide. This brings greater access to AI technologies for their benefit as both companies believe in democratising access to today’s AI models.
While Microsoft continues to partner with other tech giants in incorporating AI into its products, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed his xAI company which will compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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.
