Meta's Llama AI Models Dominate Open-Source AI with 350 Million Downloads

Meta's Llama models hit 350 million downloads, leads open-source AI

Meta's Llama series of AI models have become the fastest growing open-source family of models securing 350 million downloads globally on Hugging Face. Of these, 20 million downloads were made last month alone, the company said. Besides the community platform Hugging Face, Llama was also being accessed through Meta's cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft's Azure, Databricks, Dell, Google Cloud, Groq, NVIDIA, IBM watsonx, Scale AI, Snowflake, to name a few. "Hosted Llama usage by token volume across our major cloud service provider partners more than doubled May through July 2024 when we released Llama 3.1," Meta said in a blogpost on Thursday. Monthly usage (token volume) of Llama grew 10x from January to July 2024 for some of the largest cloud service providers. "We've heard from a number of companies that want to be future LEAP and integration Llama partners, including Wipro, Cerebras, and Lambda," it added. Industry leaders said growing adoption of Llama meant that Meta is closing the performance gap between open-source models and top proprietary models like OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude etc. "In the weeks since launch, thousands of Databricks customers have adopted Llama 3.1, making it our fastest adopted and best selling open source model ever," Ali Ghodsi, CEO & Co-Founder, Databricks was quoted in the same blogpost. "This generation of Llama models finally bridges the gap between OSS and commercial models on quality. Llama 3.1 is a breakthrough for customers wanting to build high quality AI applications, while retaining full control, customizability, and portability over their base LLM," he said. "Open-source wins. Meta is building the foundation of an open ecosystem that rivals the top closed models and at Groq we put them directly into the hands of the developers....We can't add capacity fast enough for Llama. If we 10x'd the deployed capacity it would be consumed in under 36 hours," said Jonathan Ross, Founder & CEO, Elon Musk's AI project Groq. Meta said with more than 60,000 derivative models on Hugging Face, there's a vibrant community of developers fine-tuning Llama for their own use cases. It shared a few success stories of large enterprises like AT&T, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Shopify, and Zoom etc. using Llama. According to a survey from Artificial Analysis, an independent site for AI benchmarking, Llama was the number two most considered model and the industry leader in open source.

Meta's Llama models hit 350 million downloads, leads open-source AI

Meta's Llama series of AI models have become the fastest growing open-source family of models securing 350 million downloads globally on Hugging Face. Of these, 20 million downloads were made last month alone, the company said. Besides the community platform Hugging Face, Llama was also being accessed through Meta's cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft's Azure, Databricks, Dell, Google Cloud, Groq, NVIDIA, IBM watsonx, Scale AI, Snowflake, to name a few. "Hosted Llama usage by token volume across our major cloud service provider partners more than doubled May through July 2024 when we released Llama 3.1," Meta said in a blogpost on Thursday. Monthly usage (token volume) of Llama grew 10x from January to July 2024 for some of the largest cloud service providers. "We've heard from a number of companies that want to be future LEAP and integration Llama partners, including Wipro, Cerebras, and Lambda," it added. Industry leaders said growing adoption of Llama meant that Meta is closing the performance gap between open-source models and top proprietary models like OpenAI's GPT and Anthropic's Claude etc. "In the weeks since launch, thousands of Databricks customers have adopted Llama 3.1, making it our fastest adopted and best selling open source model ever," Ali Ghodsi, CEO & Co-Founder, Databricks was quoted in the same blogpost. "This generation of Llama models finally bridges the gap between OSS and commercial models on quality. Llama 3.1 is a breakthrough for customers wanting to build high quality AI applications, while retaining full control, customizability, and portability over their base LLM," he said. "Open-source wins. Meta is building the foundation of an open ecosystem that rivals the top closed models and at Groq we put them directly into the hands of the developers....We can't add capacity fast enough for Llama. If we 10x'd the deployed capacity it would be consumed in under 36 hours," said Jonathan Ross, Founder & CEO, Elon Musk's AI project Groq. Meta said with more than 60,000 derivative models on Hugging Face, there's a vibrant community of developers fine-tuning Llama for their own use cases. It shared a few success stories of large enterprises like AT&T, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Shopify, and Zoom etc. using Llama. According to a survey from Artificial Analysis, an independent site for AI benchmarking, Llama was the number two most considered model and the industry leader in open source.

Meta reports rapid growth in popularity for its Llama AI models, with nearly 350M downloads - SiliconANGLE

Meta reports rapid growth in popularity for its Llama AI models, with nearly 350M downloads Meta Platofrms Inc. today revealed that its Llama generative artificial models are rapidly growing in popularity, with downloads of the models increasing by ten times compared to the same time last year and are quickly approaching 350 million downloads. The figures were revealed in an upbeat mid-year update from the company behind services such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which noted that Llama is now the leading open-source generative AI model family. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's decision to offer the models open source has always been interesting, or, some might argue, a brave move by Meta. But given that AI isn't the company's core business - be it with plenty of cross-over opportunities - the decision to open source the Meta designed and trained models is starting to see success and the figures are impressive. Since the launch of Llama 3 in April and Llama 3.1 in July, Meta reports that its models were downloaded more than 20 million times in the last month and that token volume across major cloud service provider partners has more than doubled in the three months from May to July. Monthly usage (token volume) has also increased by ten times from January to July. The latest Llama 3.1 model excels at capabilities such as general knowledge, math, tool use and multilingual translation. The model also saw added support for eight new languages, including French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, with more on the way. Meta attributes the success to the models being open source. "By making our Llama models openly available we've seen a vibrant and diverse AI ecosystem come to life where developers have more choice and capability than ever before," Meta stated in the report. "The innovation has been broad and rapid, from start-ups pushing new boundaries to enterprises of all sizes using Llama to build on-premises or through a cloud service provider." Meta revealed in the report that there are now more than 60,000 derivative models on Hugging Face, a company and open-source community that provides tools, libraries and models for machine learning. The models are also being embraced by corporations, with Llama model users now including AT&T Inc., DoorDash Inc., The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Niantic Inc., Nomura Holdings Inc., Shopify Inc., Spotify Technology S.A. and Zoom Video Communications Inc. In addition, Infosys Ltd. and KPMG International Ltd. are also said to be using Llama models internally. "We're excited by the growth of the Llama community and encouraged knowing we're building the most advanced large language models, open-sourced for the world today," the report from Meta concludes.

Meta leads open-source AI boom, Llama downloads surge 10x year-over-year

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Open-source AI is finally closing in on the dominance of closed-source. Today, Meta, one of the leading players in the open model category, shared a mid-year update claiming that the adoption of its Llama family of models has surged to new heights, especially since the release of the large Llama 3.1 last month. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company revealed that the downloads for Llama models are approaching 350 million on Hugging Face, marking an over ten-fold increase from a year ago. It also noted that the adoption of the models has grown significantly - both via Hugging Face and distribution partners - with large enterprises like Zoom, Spotify, Infosys, AT&T and Goldman Sachs using them across internal and external use cases. The update shows that open-source AI, which was initially off to a slow start, is not only matching closed-source in terms of performance but also getting significant traction at the enterprise level, powering real applications. It also questions the lead of OpenAI, which has been called out for failing to deliver frontier AI products beyond announcements. Meta's open-source play paying off While OpenAI had a headstart in the generative AI game, Meta was quick to jump on the bandwagon with its Llama model. The company launched the model three months after the one behind ChatGPT. However, instead of going closed-source, it focused on an open approach, making its ecosystem - covering Llama 2, Llama 3, and most recently Llama 3.1 - available via both Hugging Face and cloud partners. "By making our Llama models openly available we've seen a vibrant and diverse AI ecosystem come to life where developers have more choice and capability than ever before. The innovation has been broad and rapid, from start-ups pushing new boundaries to enterprises of all sizes using Llama...," the company wrote in a blog post today. French startup Mistral has also followed the same strategy for many of its models. This has given developers multiple, powerful open models to build upon and create derivatives achieving parity or even outperforming closed models on select metrics (see FinGPT, BioBert, Defog SQLCoder and Phind). For Meta, the open strategy started gaining traction only after the launch of Llama 2 in July last year. Since the launch, the downloads for the company's models have surged more than 10x on Hugging Face, touching nearly 350 million. Last month, the company saw more than 20 million downloads on the platform -- which shows a further increase in traction coming from the recent release of Llama 3.1 405B. "We're seeing growing preference in the developer community for Llama and strong indicators for continued growth. According to a survey from Artificial Analysis, an independent site for AI benchmarking, Llama was the number two most considered model and the industry leader in open source," the company added. Among the enterprises tapping the Llama family of models for internal and external use cases are AT&T, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Niantic, Nomura, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, Infosys and KPMG. Many enterprise developers are also tapping Llama models via Meta's expansive network of cloud and infrastructure providers, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Groq, Nvidia, Databricks and Snowflake. The company did not share partner-specific numbers but it did confirm that Llama's monthly usage (by the volume of input/output tokens) grew ten-fold from January to July 2024 for select cloud service providers. The stats seem to show that hosted Llama usage has been growing consistently (peaking in July when Llama 3.1 was released) but it is important to note that these figures are only for some of the company's largest cloud service providers, not all partners. This means the actual monthly usage stats may vary. Pressure on OpenAI, Anthropic Either way, Llama's adoption by leading enterprises like AT&T and Spotify shows that open-source AI is catching up quickly. The recent improvements in performance and long-term cost benefits of the open approach are among the biggest factors driving this shift. With further developments in the coming months, we can expect open-source AI to completely take on the domination of closed models. This will put pressure on companies offering closed models, pushing them to innovate more and further cut down the cost of using their models. Notably, the impact of the open-source movement can already be seen. OpenAI, which triggered the generative AI wave, has significantly cut the prices of its existing models, including GPT-4o. However, in terms of product innovation, the Sam Altman-led research lab appears to be lagging now. All the cutting-edge AI products it has announced so far, including Sora and SearchGPT, either remain unreleased or available only to a select group of users.