Meta releases larger version of its open source AI model
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Meta on Tuesday announced Llama 3.1 405B, a large language model designed to rival the biggest models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
Why it matters: Meta has made its models freely available for others — with some limits — and now aims to show it can compete with the largest LLMs.
Driving the news: The release is Meta's largest text-based language model to date. The company is adding support for eight languages and larger context windows (the amount of information that can be considered as part of the user's prompt).
- The new languages include French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, with more to come, Meta said.
- In a change, Meta said its licensing terms now allow Llama's outputs to be used to help improve others' models.
- The company is also updating the smaller versions of Llama 3 to version 3.1, with additional language and context capabilities.
- The new models will be immediately available from Meta and Hugging Face. Individuals can also test Llama 3.1 through WhatsApp and at Meta.ai; the company encourages people to try it with difficult math or coding problems.
What they're saying: "Our experimental evaluation suggests that our flagship model is competitive with leading foundation models across a range of tasks, including GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet," Meta said in a blog post. "Additionally, our smaller models are competitive with closed and open models that have a similar number of parameters."
- In an open letter on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the case for the company's decision to continue making its models widely available, saying it's good for the ecosystem as well as for Meta.
- He compared it to the way Linux changed the corporate computing world, which had been previously dominated by custom, closed versions of Unix.
- "I believe that AI will develop in a similar way," Zuckerberg said. "Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed models. But open source is quickly closing the gap."
What's next: Meta said it will bring its AI capabilities to its Meta Quest headset starting next month as an experimental feature, offering it as a replacement for the VR headset's existing voice commands feature.
