In its latest AI advancement, Facebook parent company Meta has released its Code Llama LLM which can use text prompts to generate and discuss code. The company says that Code Llama is a ‘state-of-the-art’ LLM that is publicly available to assist with coding tasks with the potential to make workflows faster and more efficient for developers and people who are just starting to learn how to code.
Meta also says that its new AI tool for coding has the potential to be used as a productivity and educational tool to assist programmers in writing well-documented software.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the release on Facebook where he stated, “Today we’re releasing Code Llama, a set of LLMs for code generation built on Llama 2. This release includes Code Llama Instruct, which is fine-tuned for understanding natural language, and Code Llama Python, which specializes in Python code.”
An open approach to AI
The Instagram company believes that an open approach to AI is best for developing new AI tools that are creative, safe and responsible, which is the primary reason it is releasing Code Llama for both research and commercial use under the same community license as Llama 2.
According to a Meta blog post, “Code Llama is a code-specialized version of Llama 2 that was created by further training Llama 2 on its code-specific datasets, sampling more data from that same dataset for longer. Essentially, Code Llama features enhanced coding capabilities.”
“It can generate code and natural language about code, from both code and natural language prompts (eg: ‘Write me a function that outputs the fibonacci sequence’). It can also be used for code completion and debugging. It supports many of the most popular programming languages used today, including Python, C++, Java, PHP, Typescript (Javascript), C#, Bash and more,” wrote Meta.
Programmers are already using LLMs to help with different tasks. Meta says its goal is to make developers’ workflows more efficient, allowing them to concentrate on the most human-centric parts of their job instead of doing repetitive tasks.
You can download the Code Llama model from the official website and grab the training recipes on Meta’s GitHub repository.
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.
