Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this on Friday Meta platformsimminent release to researchers of a new large language model called LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI). The model, developed by Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, is intended to help scientists and engineers explore AI applications and functions such as answering questions and summarizing documents.
The release of LLaMA comes as technology companies race to promote advances in AI techniques and integrate technology into their commercial products. If CNBC notes, Meta’s release differs from competitors’ models because it will be available in a selection of sizes, from 7 billion parameters to 65 billion parameters. In addition, Zuckerberg said his company’s new LLM technology — which could eventually solve math problems and conduct scientific research — will be available to the research community, and Meta is now accepting applications for access. This is a change from Google’s underlying models of LaMDA and ChatGPT, which are not publicly available.
Reuters points out that Meta is in an increasingly intense race to dominate AI technology, which began in earnest in late 2022 with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As for Meta, the launch of LLaMA also represents its commitment to open science – hence the choice to publicly release the state-of-the-art fundamental large language model, along with providing researchers with an open source to advance their work . Meta believes that their models, unlike more sophisticated models designed for specific purposes, will prove versatile, with multiple use cases.
Another way LLaMA is different, according to Meta: It requires “much less” computing power than previous offerings and is trained in 20 languages, with an emphasis on languages based on the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. With its 13 billion parameters, LLaMA should outperform GPT-3, the model ChatGPT is built on. Meta also attributed LLaMA’s performance to “cleaner” data and “architectural improvements” in the model that improved training stability.
To preserve the integrity of the model and prevent misuse, Meta will release it under a non-commercial license aimed at research use cases. Academic researchers, government, civil society, academic institutions and industrial research laboratories are granted model access on a case-by-case basis.
Meta’s launch of LLaMA could mark an important development in AI language models. The social media giant’s commitment to open science and allowing researchers to study under a non-commercial license will limit abuse of the model.
LLaMA’s versatility and problem-solving capabilities can provide a glimpse into the substantial potential benefits of AI for billions of people at scale.
