Meta Unveils Llama 3: A Leap Forward in AI Language Models

Meta's AI Assistant Got an LLM Update. Here's What You Need to Know

Tech giant Meta this week released the latest generation of its large language model, Llama 3.1 405B, an open-source model it says is on par with proprietary LLM competitors like OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Llama is what powers the Meta AI assistant. As of Tuesday, Llama 3.1 405B is accessible via the assistant you run into on WhatsApp (which is owned by Meta) and on the Meta.ai site. Though you can also use Meta AI on Instagram and Facebook, it wasn't immediately clear if the latest model is available on those platforms as well. A spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment. Meta's first version of Llama was released in February 2023, but even CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that early versions of Llama lagged behind their peers. "Last year, Llama 2 was only comparable to an older generation of models behind the frontier," he wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. Large language models are the technology behind generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta AI. They're trained on massive data sets to learn how we use language so they can generate their own unique content that sounds at least plausibly human. In addition to now having access to Llama 3.1 405B, Meta AI's image generation feature, Imagine, is starting to enable what the company calls "Imagine me" prompts, which allow you to create images of yourself doing things like surfing or as part of a surrealist painting, based on existing photos. Meta AI is also getting new editing tools, which will allow you to remove and edit objects within images. Starting this week, English language users will be able to share those images on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Meta AI's image generator was one feature that wowed my CNET colleague Katelyn Chedraoui in what she otherwise felt was a "convenient but unimpressive" assistant. Llama has been downloaded more than 300 million times to date, according to Meta's figures. The latest Llama models, which also include Llama 3.1 8B and 70B, have a context window of 128,000 tokens, which is a measurement of how much the model can remember in a given conversation. OpenAI's GPT-4o and the newly announced GPT-4o Mini also have context windows of 128,000 tokens, while Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro has a window of 1 million tokens. According to a separate blog post, Llama's improved reasoning capabilities help Meta AI understand more complex queries -- especially when it comes to math and coding. The Meta models also support eight languages. Like Llama 3, which came out in April, Llama 3.1 405B was trained on more than 15 trillion tokens, which is equivalent to about 11.25 trillion words. Meta says that the 8B and 70B models are best suited for text summaries and as conversational agents and coding assistants. Meanwhile, 405B can be used to create synthetic data, or data that's generated by algorithms or through computer simulations (rather than coming from real-world sources). It can also be used in model distillation, which is the process of transferring knowledge from an LLM to a smaller model, which offers AI capabilities and speed while taking up fewer computing resources. More than 25 partners, such as Amazon, Databricks and Nvidia, are launching related services for Llama 3.1 405B to support these developers, which Zuckerberg also believes gives the model a fighting chance. A key difference between Llama and its peers is that the Meta model is open source. LLMs come in two varieties. Proprietary LLMs can be used only by developers who purchase access. Open-source LLMs are widely available for free. Zuckerberg said this will ultimately make Llama and Meta AI more competitive, much like the open-source version of Linux software eventually became more popular than the closed, proprietary versions of Unix software that were developed by major tech companies. In his blog post, Zuckerberg argued this is because Linux allowed developers to experiment and it was more affordable, which led to more users and, ultimately, more advancements.

Llama 3.1 is Meta's latest salvo in the battle for AI dominance

Trained on 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, the 405B parameter model beats rivals at math, coding and multilingual tasks, Meta claimed. Meta on Tuesday announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest version of its large language model that the company claims now rivals competitors from OpenAI and Anthropic. The new model comes just three months after Meta launched Llama 3 by integrating it into Meta AI, a chatbot that now lives in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and also powers the company's smart glasses. In the interim, OpenAI and Anthropic already released new versions of their own AI models, a sign that Silicon Valley's AI arms race isn't slowing down any time soon. In a blog post, Meta said that the new model, called Llama 3.1 405B, is the first openly available model that can compete available rivals in general knowledge, math skills and translating across multiple languages. The model was trained on more than 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, currently the fastest available chips that cost roughly $25,000 each, and can beat rivals on over 150 benchmarks, Meta claimed. The "405B" stands for 405 billion parameters, which are internal variables that an AI model uses to reason and make decisions. The higher the number of parameters an AI model has, the smarter we perceive it to be. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, by comparison, is reportedly has roughly 1.5 trillion parameters, although the company has not disclosed the number so far. In addition, Meta also released upgraded versions of existing Llama models that contain 70 billion and 8 billion parameters each, claiming that the newer versions had stronger reasoning abilities among other things. Developers can download Llama 3.1 from its official website, while regular users can play with it through Meta AI in WhatsApp or on meta.ai, the company's website for its chatbot. "Llama 405B's improved reasoning capabilities make it possible for Meta AI to understand and answer your more complex questions, especially on the topics of math and coding," Meta's blog post states. "You can get help on your math homework with step-by-step explanations and feedback, write code faster with debugging support and optimization." (Editor's note: Engadget will pit Llama 3.1 against the New York Times Spelling Bee and report back to you). For now, Meta AI on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram are still restricted to the smaller version of Llama 3.1 that uses 70 billion parameters. Unlike OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic that keep their AI models proprietary, Meta's AI models are open source, which means that anyone can modify and use them for free and without sharing personal data with Meta. In a letter published on Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that an open source approach to AI development will ensure wider access to the technology's benefits, prevent the concentration of power among a few big companies, and enable safer AI deployment across society. By open sourcing the company's largest language model to date, Meta aims to make Llama the "industry standard" for anyone to develop AI-powered apps and services with, Zuckerberg wrote. Open sourcing AI models and adding them to its existing products already used by billions of people could allow Meta to compete more effectively with OpenAI whose ChatGPT and DALL-E chatbots ignited an AI explosion when they launched in 2022. And it could also boost engagement -- Meta announced today that users would soon be able to add AI-generated images directly into feeds, stories, comments and messages across Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. In his letter, Zuckerberg also criticized Apple and its closed ecosystem, arguing that the iPhone maker's restrictive and arbitrary policies had constrained what Meta could build on its platforms. "[It's] clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our producers and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build," he wrote.

Llama will augment Indian startups' work on Indic language models: Meta executive

Meta, on Tuesday, launched its largest-ever open-source AI model Llama 3.1 405B, and claims to have closed the performance gap with top closed-source models such as Open AI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The latest iteration of Llama, which has 405 billion parameters, was trained on a massive 15 trillion tokens using 16,000 of Nvidia's ultra-expensive H100 GPUs.Synthetic data generation capabilities of Meta's largest open-source artificial intelligence model Llama 3.1 will augment the efforts of Indian startups, which may be encountering a paucity of real-world quality data available in local languages, a senior executive said. "We think of Llama as this general base model, that companies and developers like (Indian AI startup) Sarvam should be able to customise to bring the nuances of language and culture," Ragavan Srinivasan, vice president - product management at Meta, told ET. It is hard for a general-purpose large language model to bring that nuance, but it can generate synthetic data which can be fine-tuned to deeply understand the nuance of Hindi or Kannada or Marathi. Meta, on Tuesday, launched its largest-ever open-source AI model Llama 3.1 405B, and claims to have closed the performance gap with top closed-source models such as Open AI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The latest iteration of Llama, which has 405 billion parameters, was trained on a massive 15 trillion tokens using 16,000 of Nvidia's ultra-expensive H100 GPUs. It also announced updating Meta's commercial licence to allow developers to generate synthetic data from Llama 405B which can be further used to distil/train other proprietary models. Model distillation means the ability of a large model to transfer elements of its intelligence to a smaller model without the need to train on humongous worldly data. Experts said Meta's new proposition could help customers meet their unique price/performance needs and optimise usage depending on applications built on top of Llama's foundation. "Meta made a very strategic bet...You can now get the specificity of SLMs (small language models) for narrow use cases while benefiting from the breadth of knowledge represented by the Llama LLM," said Hemant Mohapatra, partner, Lightspeed. "In a world full of millions of SLMs, one could see how Meta/Llama could become the central technological layer." But the cost of deploying the 405B model for large scale enterprise use is a challenge. Therefore, Meta expects most organisations to use smaller versions, the 70B and 8B hosted on cloud, Meta's Srinivasan explained. When compared to the competitive pricing of other closed-source rivals such as GPT-4o Mini or Gemini Flash, he said, "Over the course of the next few months, I would expect a lot more efficiency and optimisation. This is typical for open-source software." He added that besides cost, model distillation is a very unique proposition which is hard to find in proprietary closed vendors. Until date, all versions of Llama have recorded 300 million downloads globally, the company said. Srinivasan said India is among the top 3-4 markets for Meta models. Meanwhile, the Meta AI assistant for consumer use is rivalling the popularity of ChatGPT. Chief executive Mark Zuckerburg wrote that within months of launch Meta AI assistant is set to cross ChatGPT's usage by 2024 end. But experts feel that is not an easy task. "ChatGPT continues to be the most popular conversational AI chatbot due to its higher accuracy, multi-modality and extensibility," said Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished vice president, analyst at Gartner. "While the usage of Meta AI may grow within the apps (such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook), OpenAI still has a huge mindshare and impressive paid customer base as a general purpose and versatile chatbot."

Meta unveils biggest Llama 3 AI model, touting language and math gains

Meta's Llama 3, featuring 405 billion parameters, rivals OpenAI and Amazon. Enhanced coding and math, scoring 73.8 on MATH and 88.6 on MMLU, boost its appeal. Future multimodal versions will incorporate text, image, video, and speech. The Meta AI chatbot, gaining popularity, promises efficiency and attracts developers.Meta Platforms released the biggest version of its mostly free Llama 3 artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, boasting multilingual skills and general performance metrics that nip at the heels of paid models from rivals like OpenAI. The new Llama 3 model can converse in eight languages, write higher-quality computer code and solve more complex math problems than previous versions, the Facebook parent company said in blog posts and a research paper announcing the release. With 405 billion parameters, or variables that the algorithm takes into account to generate responses to user queries, it dwarfs the previous version released last year though is still smaller than leading models offered by competitors. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, by contrast, is reported to have one trillion parameters and Amazon is preparing a model with 2 trillion parameters. Promoting Llama 3 across multiple channels, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said he expected future Llama models would overtake proprietary competitors by next year. The Meta AI chatbot powered by those models was on track to become the most popular AI assistant by the end of this year, with hundreds of millions of people using it already, he said. The release comes as tech companies are racing to show that their growing portfolios of resource-hungry large language models can deliver significant enough gains in known problem areas like advanced reasoning to justify the gargantuan sums that have been invested in them. Meta's own top AI scientist has said he believes such models will hit up against limits on reasoning and that other types of AI systems will be needed to produce breakthroughs. In addition to its flagship 405 billion parameter model, Meta is also releasing updated versions of its lighter-weight 8 billion and 70 billion parameter Llama 3 models initially introduced in the spring, the company said. All three new models are multilingual and can handle larger user requests via an expanded "context window," which Meta's head of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, said would improve the experience of generating computer code in particular. "That was the number one feedback we got from the community," Al-Dahle told Reuters in an interview, noting that bigger context windows give the models something akin to a longer memory that aids in processing multi-step requests. Separately, Al-Dahle said his team had been able to improve the Llama 3 model's performance on tasks such as solving math problems by using AI to generate some of the data on which they were trained. Meta releases its Llama models largely free-of-charge for use by developers, a strategy Zuckerberg says will pay off in the form of innovative products, less dependence on would-be competitors and greater engagement on the company's core social networks. Some investors have raised their eyebrows at the costs entailed, however. The company also stands to benefit if developers opt to use its free models over paid ones, which would undercut the business models of its rivals. With its announcement, Meta touted gains on key math and knowledge tests that may make that prospect more appealing. Although measuring progress on AI development is notoriously difficult, test results provided by Meta appeared to suggest that its largest Llama 3 model was nearly matching and in some cases besting Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o, which are widely regarded as the two most powerful frontier models on the market. On the MATH benchmark of competition level math word problems, for example, Meta's model posted a score of 73.8, compared to GPT-4o's 76.6 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 71.1. The model scored 88.6 on MMLU, a benchmark that covers dozens of subjects across math, science and the humanities, while GPT-4o scored 88.7 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet scored 88.3. In their paper, Meta researchers also teased upcoming "multimodal" versions of the models due out later this year that layer image, video and speech capabilities on top of the core Llama 3 text model. Early experiments indicate those models can perform "competitively" with other multimodal models such as Google's Gemini 1.5 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, they said.

Meta unveils biggest Llama 3 AI model, touting language and math gains closing in on OpenAI

Meta Platforms released the biggest version of its mostly free Llama 3 artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, boasting multilingual skills and general performance metrics that nip at the heels of paid models from rivals like OpenAI. The new Llama 3 model can converse in eight languages, write higher-quality computer code and solve more complex math problems than previous versions, the Facebook parent company said in blog posts and a research paper announcing the release. With 405 billion parameters, or variables that the algorithm takes into account to generate responses to user queries, it eclipses the previous version released last year, though is still smaller than leading models offered by competitors. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, by contrast, is reported to have one trillion parameters and Amazon is preparing a model with 2 trillion parameters. Meta content moderation vendors hit by global cyber outage (Unravel the complexities of our digital world on The Interface podcast, where business leaders and scientists share insights that shape tomorrow's innovation. The Interface is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.) Promoting Llama 3 across multiple channels, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said he expected future Llama models would overtake proprietary competitors by next year. The Meta AI chatbot powered by those models was on track to become the most popular AI assistant by the end of this year, with hundreds of millions of people using it already, he said. The release comes as tech companies are racing to show that their growing portfolios of resource-hungry large language models can deliver significant enough gains in known problem areas like advanced reasoning to justify the gargantuan sums that have been invested in them. Meta's own top AI scientist has said he believes such models will hit up against limits on reasoning and that other types of AI systems will be needed to produce breakthroughs. In addition to its flagship 405 billion-parameter model, Meta is also releasing updated versions of its lighter-weight 8-billion and 70-billion parameter Llama 3 models initially introduced in the spring, the company said. All three new models are multilingual and can handle larger user requests via an expanded "context window," which Meta's head of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, said would improve the experience of generating computer code in particular. "That was the number one feedback we got from the community," Al-Dahle told Reuters in an interview, noting that bigger context windows give the models something akin to a longer memory that aids in processing multi-step requests. Separately, Al-Dahle said his team had been able to improve the Llama 3 model's performance on tasks such as solving math problems by using AI to generate some of the data on which they were trained. Meta releases its Llama models largely free-of-charge for use by developers, a strategy Zuckerberg says will pay off in the form of innovative products, less dependence on would-be competitors and greater engagement on the company's core social networks. Some investors have raised their eyebrows at the costs entailed, however. The company also stands to benefit if developers opt to use its free models over paid ones, which would undercut the business models of its rivals. With its announcement, Meta touted gains on key math and knowledge tests that may make that prospect more appealing. Although measuring progress on AI development is notoriously difficult, test results provided by Meta appeared to suggest that its largest Llama 3 model was nearly matching and in some cases besting Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o, which are widely regarded as the two most powerful frontier models on the market. Meta changes its 'Made with AI' labels after backlash from users over accuracy On the MATH benchmark of competition level math word problems, for example, Meta's model posted a score of 73.8, compared to GPT-4o's 76.6 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 71.1. The model scored 88.6 on MMLU, a benchmark that covers dozens of subjects across math, science and the humanities, while GPT-4o scored 88.7 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet scored 88.3. In their paper, Meta researchers also teased upcoming "multimodal" versions of the models due out later this year that layer image, video and speech capabilities on top of the core Llama 3 text model. Early experiments indicate those models can perform "competitively" with other multimodal models such as Google's Gemini 1.5 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, they said. Read Comments

Meta unveils Llama 3.1, its biggest open source model yet | Digital Trends

Facebook parent company Meta announced the release of its Llama 3.1 open source large language model on Tuesday. The new LLM will be available in three sizes -- 8B, 70B, and 405B parameters -- the latter being the largest open-source AI built to date, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes as "the first frontier-level open source AI model." "Last year, Llama 2 was only comparable to an older generation of models behind the frontier," Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "This year, Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models and leading in some areas. Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry." Trained on 15 trillion tokens using 16,000 H100 GPUs, Meta claims that the 405B model is significantly larger than its Llama 3 predecessor. It reportedly rivals today's top closed source models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google's Gemini 1.5, or Anthropic's Claude 3.5 in "general knowledge, math, tool use, and multilingual translation. Zuckerberg predicted on Instagram on Tuesday that Meta AI would surpass ChatGPT as the most widely used AI assistant by the end of the year. Recommended Videos The company notes that all three versions of Llama 3.1 will enjoy expanded prompt lengths of 128k tokens, enabling users to provide added context and up to a book's worth of supporting documentation. They'll also support eight languages at launch. What's more, Meta has amended its license agreement to allow developers to use Llama 3.1 outputs to train other models. Meta also announced that it is partnering with more than a dozen other companies in the industry to further develop the Llama ecosystem. Amazon, Databricks, and Nvidia will launch full-service software suites to help developers fine-tune their own models based off Llama, while the startup Groq has "built low-latency, low-cost inference serving" for the new family of 3.1 models, Zuckerberg wrote. Being open-source, Llama 3.1 will be available on all the major cloud services including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

Meta introduces Llama 3.1, its biggest and best open-source AI model to date - SiliconANGLE

Meta introduces Llama 3.1, its biggest and best open-source AI model to date Meta Platforms Inc. today unveiled its largest-ever open-source artificial intelligence model to date, Llama 3.1 405B, that the company claims can rival even the most powerful closed source models on the market including those from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. According to Meta, Llama 3.1 excels at state-of-the-art capabilities such as general knowledge, math, tool use and multilingual translation. On the language front, the company added support for eight new languages, including French, German, Hindi, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, with more on the way. "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's research team said about the release in a blog post. "Additionally, our smaller models are competitive with closed and open models that have a similar number of parameters." Llama 3.1 is an upgrade to the Llama 3 large language model the company released in April 2024 and will come in a staggering 405 billion parameter size. However, that model is only available in 8 billion and 70 billion parameter versions. With this new ultra-large release, those two models are also getting upgrades. The new model 3.1 has a 128,000 token context window, this is the size of the input that users can feed it before text sent to it gets cut off. That many tokens would allow the model to read most extremely large reports, medium sized books, long transcripts and other large documents. That many tokens amount to around 96,000 words or the length of a stand-alone novel of about 400 pages. Meta said that the new context window and multilingual support will also come to the 8B and 70B models. This will enable them to be remain easy to use in smaller footprints, while still providing advanced reasoning, support advanced use cases, such as long-form summarization, multilingual conversation and coding capabilities. The company also said that it is changing its licensing so that developers may now use the outputs from Llama models, including its new 405B model, to "teach" smaller models. This will allow developers to use larger, smarter models to improve other models through training and fine-tuning. Mark Zukerberg, chief executive of Meta, said that the release of Llama 3.1 represents the company's commitment to open-source innovation. "Today, Linux is the industry standard foundation for both cloud computing and the operating systems that run most mobile devices -- and we all benefit from superior products because of it," Zuckerberg said in a blog post. "I believe that AI will develop similarly. Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed models. But open source is quickly closing the gap. According to Zuckerberg, keeping the Llama models open source maintains each individuals' capability to use and train their own without the worry that some organization can pull the rug out from under them. It allows them to "control their own destiny." It also makes models more affordable and efficient in the long run. Zuckerberg said that inference on Llama 3.1 405B can be run on developer's own infrastructure at roughly 50% the cost of large closed-source models such as OpenAI's flagship model GPT-4o. "The open-source nature of Llama 3.1 405B represents a significant step forward in democratizing access to AI technology. Meta is enabling researchers and developers worldwide to explore, innovate, and build upon state-of-the-art language AI without the barriers of proprietary APIs or expensive licensing fees," Victor Botev, chief technology officer and co-founder of AI research assistant tool developer Iris.ai told SiliconANGLE. "This approach emphasizes transparent development, fosters collaboration and accelerates progress in the field, potentially leading to breakthroughs that benefit society as a whole." Botev warned, however, that the extremely large size of the model could work against it. Prioritizing colossal model sizes in AI development come with pitfalls due to computational resource and energy consumption needs, which can lead to both cost and environmental sustainability issues down the road. "Innovations in model efficiency might benefit the AI community more than simply scaling up to larger sizes," Botev said.

Meta Unveils Llama 3.1, World's Largest Open-Source AI Model | MySmartPrice

The new AI model also supports Hinglish, where users can speak to the chatbot in Hindi by using English (Roman) alphabets. Meta has launched its Llama 3.1 AI model with improved reasoning and logical capabilities. The highlight of this large language model (LLM) is its open-source nature. Meta says Llama 3.1 is the world's largest open-source AI model that can compete against the closed-system AI models from OpenAI, Claude, and others. Here are the details. AI chatbots like Meta AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. are powered by LLMs trained on large data sets. However, these AI models are not readily accessible to the public and software developers as they contain several engineering and trade secrets. Meta has made its Llama 3.1 AI model open-source, allowing developers to implement and deploy it anywhere, without any restrictions. Llama 3.1 has advanced reasoning skills to solve complex queries like mathematical equations, coding, debugging, and other reasoning-related tasks. It can also provide step-by-step explanations while generating a response. The new AI model also introduces improved support for image generation, allowing users to create avatars by analyzing their faces. Coming to the developer side of things, Meta's open-source Llama 3.1 model is faster and more efficient than OpenAI's GPT-4, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and many other flagship-grade AI models. Meta's model is generating higher scores in IFEval, GSMBK, and Arc Challenge, which test the reasoning capabilities of the AI model. The biggest advantage of the Llama 3.1 model is its reduced implementation costs. It is said to cost just half as much as GPT-4o to run in production. To recall, GPT-4o was already designed to be a cheaper model by OpenAI, and Meta's Llama 3.1 model now undercuts it at an even lower price. Software developers can now implement Llama 3.1 across their projects. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also mentioned that the company is committed to making AI an open-source environment to ensure maximum benefits and safety for all users. The new Llama 3.1 model has started rolling out to all users in the Meta AI chatbot. It can be accessed on the Meta AI website, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger apps. Meta AI continues to be available for free to all users. The chatbot has also introduced support for new languages, which include Hindi, Hindi-Romanized script (also known as Hinglish), French, German, Spanish, Italian, and many others.

Meta debuts newest Llama AI model with help from Nvidia and cloud partners

Meta on Tuesday announced the latest version of its Llama artificial intelligence model. It's the biggest and most capable AI model from Meta to date and continues to be open source, which means it can be accessed for free. The new large language model, or LLM, underscores the social network's massive investment into keeping up with competition with other AI leaders, such as high-flying startups like OpenAI and Anthropic and other tech giants like Google and Amazon. The announcement also highlights the close and growing partnership between Meta and Nvidia. Nvidia is a key Meta partner and provides the social networking giant with the computing chips called GPUs to help train its AI models, including the latest version of Llama. While companies like OpenAI aim to make money selling access to their proprietary LLMs or offering services to help clients use the technology, Meta has no plans to debut its own competing enterprise tech business, a Meta spokesperson said during a media briefing. Instead, similar to when Meta released Llama 2 last summer, the company is partnering with a handful of tech companies that will offer their customers access to Llama 3.1 via their respective cloud computing platform, as well as sell security and management tools that work with the new software. Some of Meta's 25 Llama-related corporate partners include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Databricks and Dell. Although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told analysts during previous corporate earnings calls that Meta generates some revenue from its corporate Llama partnerships, a Meta spokesperson said that any financial benefit is merely incremental. Instead, Meta believes that by investing in Llama and related AI technologies and making them available for free via open source, it can attract high-quality talent in a competitive market and lower its overall computing infrastructure costs, among other benefits. Meta's launch of Llama 3.1 was timed to the week that Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are scheduled to speak together at a conference focusing on advanced computer graphics. The social networking giant is one of Nvidia's top end-customers that doesn't run its own business-facing cloud, and Meta needs the latest chips in order to train its AI models, which it uses internally for targeting and other products. For example, Meta said that Llama model announced on Tuesday was trained on 16,000 of Nvidia's H100 graphics processors. But the relationship is also important to both companies for what it represents. For Nvidia, the fact that Meta is training open-source models that other companies can use and adapt for their businesses -- without paying a licensing fee or asking for permission -- could expand the usage of Nvidia's own chips and keep demand high. But open-source models can cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to create. There aren't many companies that are financially able to develop and release open-source models with similar amounts of investment. Google and OpenAI, although they are Nvidia customers, keep their most advanced models private. Meta, on the other hand, needs a reliable supply of the latest GPUs to train increasingly powerful models. Like Nvidia, Meta is trying to foster an ecosystem of developers who are building AI apps with the company's open-source software at the center, even if Meta has to essentially give away code and so-called AI weights that are expensive to build. The open-source approach benefits Meta by exposing developers to its internal tools and by inviting them to build on top of it, Ash Jhaveri, the company's VP of AI partnerships, told CNBC. It also helps Meta because it uses its AI models internally, thus enabling the company to reap improvements made by the open-source community, he said. Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post on Tuesday that it was taking a "different approach" to the Llama release this week, adding, "We're actively building partnerships so that more companies in the ecosystem can offer unique functionality to their customers as well." Because Meta isn't an enterprise vendor, the social networking giant can refer companies who inquire about Llama to one of its enterprise partners, like Nvidia, Jhaveri said. Meta also said that the company's U.S.-based WhatsApp users and visitors of its Meta.AI website will be able to witness the capabilities of Llama 3.1 by interacting with the company's digital assistant. Presumably, Meta's digital assistant, which will run on the latest version of Llama, will be able to answer complicated math problems or solve software coding issues, a Meta spokesperson explained. WhatsApp and Meta.AI users who are based in the U.S. will be able to toggle between the new, gigantic Llama 3.1 LLM or a less-capable but faster and smaller version for answers to their queries, the Meta spokesperson said.

Meta unveils Llama 3.1 AI model with 405B parameters, Meta AI gains multilingual support and more

Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg, has introduced Llama 3.1 405B, the largest and most capable open-source AI model. With over 300 million downloads of all Llama versions, Meta aims to continue driving innovation. Meta evaluated Llama 3.1 405B on over 150 benchmark datasets and through extensive human evaluations. The model is competitive with top AI models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The 405B was trained on over 15 trillion tokens using 16,000 H100 GPUs, marking a significant achievement in model training. Meta envisions Llama models as part of a broader system with components like Llama Guard 3 and Prompt Guard. They are releasing the "Llama Stack" on GitHub, a set of standardized interfaces for building toolchain components and agentic applications. Also, Meta seeks community feedback to enhance interoperability. Developers can leverage the 405B model for various tasks, including real-time and batch inference, fine-tuning, and synthetic data generation. Meta has partnered with AWS, NVIDIA, and Databricks for cloud solutions and optimized inference with Groq and Dell. Unlike closed models, Llama model weights are downloadable, allowing developers to fully customize them for specific applications. Meta highlights that Llama models offer low-cost tokens, enabling widespread access to AI. Meta ensures the safe use of its models through measures like red teaming and safety fine-tuning. The company encourages the community to build new experiences using the multilinguality and extended context length of Llama 3.1, supported by new safety tools and the Llama Stack. Meta, alongside the introduction of Llama 3.1, has announced several updates to Meta AI, enhancing its capabilities and availability. Meta AI is now accessible in 22 countries, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Cameroon. Creative Tools: Meta AI introduces "Imagine me" prompts, allowing users to visualize themselves in different scenarios, such as surfing or vacationing. This feature, currently in beta in the U.S., generates images based on user photos and prompts. Users can further customize these images by adding or changing elements with the upcoming "Edit with AI" button, set to launch next month. Image Integration: Users can now create and share Meta AI-generated images directly within Facebook posts, stories, comments, and messages, with initial availability in English and plans to extend to other languages and apps. Advanced Model for Complex Queries: Meta AI now includes Llama 405B, its largest and most advanced open-source model, which improves the assistant's ability to handle complex questions, particularly in math and coding. This model provides detailed explanations, debugging support, and optimization suggestions. Meta AI will soon be available on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and, starting next month, on Meta Quest in the U.S. and Canada. It will replace the current Voice Commands on Quest, enabling hands-free control of the headset, real-time information updates, and interaction with physical surroundings through Passthrough Vision. Llama 3.1 models are available for download on llama.meta.com and Hugging Face, and for immediate development on partner platforms.

Meta just took the AI fight to OpenAI in a big way -- here's how Llama 3.1 beats ChatGPT

Meta has just released the latest version of its Llama family of artificial intelligence models including the largest version to date, coming in at 820GB. The company says this is a new upgrade across the family, calling them Llama 3.1, including reasoning improvements to the small and mid-tier versions. These will also still be open-source, meaning any company or organization can download, fine-tune, and run the model on its own hardware. Llama 3.1 405b, which means 405 billion parameters, is the big change for both Meta and the open-source AI community with the company claiming it beats Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o on a number of key benchmarks. While Meta will use this in its own MetaAI chatbot, the model will bring advanced frontier-grade intelligence to companies to install on their own hardware, to adapt to their own needs and to use without paying per-token charges to OpenAI. During training and subsequent fine-tuning Meta says it focused on 'helpfulness' of its chatbot. Explaining in a statement: "With Llama 3.1 405B, we strove to improve the helpfulness, quality, and detailed instruction-following capability of the model in response to user instructions while ensuring high levels of safety. " It comes with a much larger 128,000 token context window, which means brings it roughly in-line with the industry standard. Llama 3.1 comes in in three sizes. The first is 8B, which is light-weight and ultra-fast, able to run anywhere including on a smartphone. Then you have 70B, which is the high performant but cost effective model, mainly run in a data center but could operate on a good gaming PC. Finally, there's the new flagship foundation model 405B, which is approaching the same quality and capabilities as the big private models from the likes of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Llama 3.1, including the new 405b version, is available in the MetaAI chatbot but that has a limited release globally. More widely, you can access it using the Groq Cloud or even the very quick Groq chatbot interface. Other developer-focused platforms from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, DataBricks and more are also loading the new models and if you've got your own data center you can download all three versions from GitHub and run them yourself. The two smaller versions -- 8b and 70B -- are available on Ollama, an easy installer for local AI models on Windows, Mac and Linux. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts MetaAI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, beating out ChatGPT as the number one way to access AI. He says this will be thanks to expanded access to the assistant through WhatsApp, Instagram, the Ray-Ban smart glasses and the standalone MetaAI chatbot. It is also coming to the Quest mixed-reality headsets to replace the current voice commands.

Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta's newest AI model to become the industry standard

Meta is taking on its artificial intelligence rivals with the latest version of its Llama model, saying open-source AI is "good for the world." The open-source Llama 3.1 models released Tuesday, which Meta calls its "most capable" to date, include its largest model, Llama 3.1 405B, which stands for 405 billion parameters, or the variables a model learns from training data that guide its behavior. Llama 3.1 405B rivals its closed-source competitors from OpenAI and Google in "state-of-the-art capabilities," including general knowledge, math, and translating languages, Meta said. The release also includes upgraded versions of its 8B and 70B models which were introduced in April. Llama 3.1 405B was evaluated on over 150 benchmark datasets and by humans against other leading foundation models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-4o, and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which are closed-source models. While Llama 3.1 405B was outperformed on some benchmarks, the "experimental evaluation suggests that our flagship model is competitive" with the other leading models, Meta said. The model was trained with over 16,000 of Nvidia's H100 GPUs, or graphics processing units, according to Meta. The chipmaker also announced a new Nvidia AI Foundry service for enterprises and nation states to build "supermodels" with Llama 3.1 405B. The Llama models are used to power Meta's AI chatbot, Meta AI, which is available on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Meta expanded access to Meta AI in Latin America and other countries on Tuesday, and announced it is offering the chatbot in seven new languages, including German and Hindi. Users have the option to use the Llama 3.1 405B-powered Meta AI on WhatsApp and meta.ai. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company expects "future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry," and that Llama 3.1 405B is a step toward making open-source models the industry standard. "AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life -- and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research," Zuckerberg said in a statement released Tuesday. "Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn't concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society." Zuckerberg, who told Bloomberg the company is working on Llama 4, said he believes "open-source AI will be safer than the alternatives," and that the company's new model "will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source."

Meta unveils largest version of Llama AI model as competition heats up

Llama 3.1 405B is "the first frontier-level open source AI model," Meta said in a post written by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. "In addition to having significantly better cost/performance relative to closed models, the fact that the 405B model is open will make it the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling smaller models," Zuckerberg wrote. Meta also announced newer version of its Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. The new Llama 3.1 405B has support has added support for eight languages (including French, German and Italian) and larger context windows. Meta also said that its licensing terms will now allow for Llama's outputs to boost other models. Zuckerberg weighed in on why open source is the best way forward for Meta, including having access to the best technology and not being locked into a closed ecosystem over the long term. "Developers can run inference on Llama 3.1 405B on their own infra at roughly 50% the cost of using closed models like GPT-4o, for both user-facing and offline inference tasks," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. OpenAI unveiled its flagship model GPT-4o in May and a cheaper version, GPT-4o mini, earlier this month. Zuckerberg added that he expects AI development to be "very competitive" for a while, "which means that open sourcing any given model isn't giving away a massive advantage over the next best models at that point in time." He also said Meta does not lose revenue by selling access to AI models. "That means openly releasing Llama doesn't undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers. (This is one reason several closed providers consistently lobby governments against open source.)" Lastly, Meta has had success with open source projects and has saved "billions of dollars" by releasing its server, network, and data center designs with Open Compute Project and having the supply chain standardize designs.

Meta Llama 3.1 is Officially Out, Dethrones GPT-4o

"I think that open source AI is going to become the industry standard just like Linux did. " After Llama 3.1 was leaked, Meta has officially released Llama 3.1 405B, a new frontier-level open source AI model, alongside its 70B and 8B versions. Meta is offering developers free access to its weights and code, and enabling fine-tuning, distillation, and deployment. The Llama 3.1 405B model performs on par with the best closed models. It supports a context length of 128k, eight languages, and offers robust capabilities in code generation, complex reasoning, and tool use. "Meta AI is on track to reach our goal of becoming the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year," said Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg. He also dropped hints about the upcoming features in Meta AI. "Over the next couple of weeks, we're also adding a couple of new features. Meta AI Imagine, which generates images as fast as you type, will also let you put yourself in your images in any style and do almost anything that you can think of. So I think that's going to be quite a bit of fun. We're also getting closer to releasing a tool that you can use to create your own AIs to interact with across our apps. More on that soon," added Zuckerberg. Meta has introduced the Llama Stack API for easy integration, supported by an ecosystem of over 25 partners, including AWS, NVIDIA, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, and Google Cloud. For this release, Meta evaluated performance on over 150 benchmark datasets across various languages. Extensive human evaluations were also conducted, comparing Llama 3.1 with competing models in real-world scenarios. The evaluation suggests that Llama 3.1 is competitive with leading foundation models such as GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Additionally, the smaller models in the Llama 3.1 series are competitive with closed and open models with similar parameter counts. Zuckerberg said that this is the Linux-like moment in the world of AI. "I think that open source AI is going to become the industry standard just like Linux did. It gives you control to customize and run your own models. You don't have to send your data to another company, and it's more affordable," he said. Llama 3.1 is designed to enable new workflows like synthetic data generation and model distillation. It is available for testing in the US on WhatsApp and at meta.ai, where users can pose challenging math or coding questions. The model was trained on over 15 trillion tokens using over 16,000 H100 GPUs, making it Meta's largest and most ambitious model to date. The training process involved significant optimisations, including a standard decoder-only transformer model architecture and iterative post-training procedures. These efforts aimed to maximize training stability and improve the quality of synthetic data. To support large-scale production inference, Meta quantised the models from 16-bit to 8-bit numerics, reducing compute requirements and enabling the model to run within a single server node. This advancement is expected to drive innovation and exploration in AI applications, offering unprecedented growth opportunities.

Meta releases a new Llama AI model that could take on ChatGPT

Meta today released a trio of new open-source large language models called Llama 3.1, the largest of which may lead to new chatbots that rival ChatGPT. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes the company's Llama powered AI assistant will be more widely used than ChatGPT by the end of this year. Llama 3.1 is actually a small family of models-Llama 3.1 405B, 70B, and 8B. (The numbers connote the number of parameters -- that is, the neuron-like connection points where calculations are made and weights are applied -- used by the models.) The 405B model was trained on a massive amount of data-15 trillion tokens, which represent words or word-parts. The tokens represent web data dating to 2024 (earlier models have been limited in their recency by cut-off dates, sometimes years in the past). The 405B model was trained using 16,000 of NVIDIA's H100 graphics processing units. State of the art "frontier" models are trained by processing large amounts of web-scraped, licensed, or synthetically generated text and image data. The new models also have the ability to reach out to other models (via APIs) to tools and knowledge sources such as up-to-date information, math expertise, and coding. Developers can download the new Llama models from Meta or from Hugging Face, or access them via major cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Databricks.

Meta Unveils New Big Llama 3 AI Model Capable Of Doing Maths Problems - News18

NEW YORK: Meta Platforms released the biggest version of its mostly free Llama 3 artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, boasting multilingual skills and general performance metrics that nip at the heels of paid models from rivals like OpenAI. The new Llama 3 model can converse in eight languages, write higher-quality computer code and solve more complex math problems than previous versions, the Facebook parent company said in blog posts and a research paper announcing the release. Its 405 billion parameters, or variables that the algorithm takes into account to generate responses to user queries, dwarfs the previous version released last year though is still smaller than leading models offered by competitors. OpenAI's GPT-4 model, by contrast, is reported to have one trillion parameters and Amazon is investing in a model with 2 trillion parameters. The release comes as tech companies are racing to show that their growing portfolios of resource-hungry large language models can deliver significant enough gains in known problem areas such as advanced reasoning to justify the gargantuan sums that have been invested in them. In addition to its flagship 405 billion parameter model, Meta is also releasing updated versions of its lighter-weight 8 billion and 70 billion parameter Llama 3 models initially introduced in the spring, the company said. All three new models are multilingual and can handle larger user requests via an expanded "context window," which Meta's head of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, said would improve the experience of generating computer code in particular. "That was the number one feedback we got from the community," Al-Dahle told Reuters in an interview, noting that bigger context windows give the models something akin to a longer memory that aids in processing multi-step requests. Meta releases its Llama models largely free-of-charge for use by developers, a strategy Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says will pay off in the form of innovative products and greater engagement on the company's core social networks. Some investors have raised their eyebrows at the costs entailed, however. The company also stands to gain if developers opt to use its free models over paid ones, which would undercut the business models of its rivals. With its announcement, Meta touted gains on key math and knowledge tests that may make that prospect more appealing. Although progress on AI development is notoriously difficult to measure, test results provided by Meta appeared to suggest that its largest Llama 3 model was nearly matching and in some cases besting Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o, which are widely regarded as the two most powerful frontier models on the market. On the MATH benchmark of competition level math word problems, for example, Meta's model posted a score of 73.8, compared to GPT-4o's 76.6 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 71.1. The model scored 88.6 on MMLU, a benchmark that covers dozens of subjects across math, science and the humanities, while GPT-4o scored 88.7 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet scored 88.3. In their paper, Meta researchers also teased upcoming "multimodal" versions of the models due out later this year that layer image, video and speech capabilities on top of the core Llama 3 text model. Early experiments indicate those models can perform "competitively" with other multimodal models such as Google's Gemini 1.5 and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, they said.

Facebook-parent Meta releases "the most advanced open source" AI model yet - Times of India

Facebook's parent company Meta has released the latest iteration of its AI model called Llama 3.1. What makes this announcement significant is that this new model is "by far the most advanced open source model" available, and is the largest one developed by Meta to date. The launch of Llama 3.1 comes as Meta looks to position itself as a major player alongside tech giants like Google, Amazon, and startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement in a video on Instagram. "We have got another big AI release today," Zuckerberg said in the video. He said that "Meta is on track to becoming the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year", adding that there are hundreds of millions of people using it everyday. The tech CEO also said that the AI model will be available in more countries soon. How Llama 3.1 is different from Llama 3 Zuckerberg added that Llama 3.1 will support more languages, offer more reasoning and is "just better overall" as compared to the predecessor. He noted that the company is adding a feature that can generate images in which 'users can put themselves in'. As per the company, the new model is being released with three training parameters: Llama 3.1 with 405 billion parameters, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as improved Llama 3.1 70 billion and 8 billion models. "In addition to having significantly better cost/performance relative to closed models, the fact that the 405B model is open will make it the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling smaller models," the company said. Zucekrberg also noted that Meta will also release a tool that will allow customers their own AI models. Meta is working with Amazon and Nvidia for developer access Similar to Meta's release of Llama 2, the company is partnering with other tech companies that will offer their customers access to Llama 3.1 via their respective cloud computing platforms. "Beyond releasing these models, we're working with a range of companies to grow the broader ecosystem. Amazon, Databricks, and Nvidia are launching full suites of services to support developers fine-tuning and distilling their own models," Meta added. Llama 3.1's largest version (with 405 billion parameters) has been trained with over 16,000 of Nvidia's H100 GPUs. The TOI Tech Desk is a dedicated team of journalists committed to delivering the latest and most relevant news from the world of technology to readers of The Times of India. TOI Tech Desk's news coverage spans a wide spectrum across gadget launches, gadget reviews, trends, in-depth analysis, exclusive reports and breaking stories that impact technology and the digital universe. Be it how-tos or the latest happenings in AI, cybersecurity, personal gadgets, platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and more; TOI Tech Desk brings the news with accuracy and authenticity.

Meta unleashes its most powerful AI model, Llama 3.1, with 405B parameters

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More After months of teasing and an alleged leak yesterday, Meta today officially released the biggest version of its open source Llama large language model (LLM), a 405 billion-parameter version called Llama-3.1. Parameters, as you'll recall, are the settings that govern how an LLM behaves and are learned from its training data, with more typically denoting more powerful models that can ideally handle more complex instructions and hopefully be more accurate than smaller parameter models. Llama 3.1 is an update to Llama 3 introduced back in April 2024, but which was only available until now in 8-billion and 70-billion versions. Now, the 405 billion parameter version can "teach" smaller models and create synthetic data. "This model, from a performance perspective, is going to deliver performance that is state of the art when it comes to open source models, and it's gonna be incredibly competitive with a lot of the proprietary, industry-leading, closed source models," said Ragavan Srinivasan, vice president of AI Program Management at Meta told VentureBeat in an interview. Llama 3.1 will be multilingual at launch and will support English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Hindi, and Thai prompts. The smaller Llama 3 models will also become multilingual starting today. Llama 3.1's context window has been expanded to 128,000 tokens -- which means users can feed it as much text as goes into a nearly 400 page novel. Benchmark testing Meta said in a blog post that it tested Llama 3.1 on over 150 benchmark datasets and performed human-guided evaluations for real-world scenarios. It said the 405B model "is competitive with leading foundation models across a range of tasks including GPT-4, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The smaller-sized models also performed similarly. The Llama family of models became a popular choice for many developers who could access the model on various platforms. Meta said Llama 3 could outperform or be on par with rival models on different benchmarks. It does well with multiple-choice questions and coding against Google's Gemma and Gemini, Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet, and Mistral's 7B Instruct. Teaching model Meta also updated the license to all its models to allow for model distillation and synthetic data creation. Model distillation, or knowledge distillation, lets users transfer knowledge or training from a larger AI model to a smaller one. Srinivasan called the 405B version a "teaching model," capable of bringing knowledge down to the 8B and 70B models. "The best way to think about the 405B model is as a teacher model. It has a lot of knowledge, a lot of capabilities and reasoning built into it," Srinivasan said. "Once you use it, maybe it's not directly deployed, but you can distill its knowledge for your specific use cases to create smaller, more efficient versions that can be fine-tuned for specific tasks." Through this model distillation, users can start building with the 405B version and either make a smaller model or train Llama 3.1 8B or 70B. However, it isn't just in the knowledge base that the 405B model could be useful in fine-tuning smaller models. The ability to create synthetic data will allow other models to learn from information without compromising copyright, personal or sensitive data, and fit for their specific purpose. A different model structure Meta said it had to optimize its training stack and used over 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to train the 405B model. To make the larger model more scalable, Meta researchers decided to use a standard transformer-only model rather than a mixture-of-experts architecture that's become popular in recent months. The company also used an "iterative post-training procedure" for supervised fine-tuning and created "highest quality" synthetic data to improve its performance. Like other Llama models before it, Llama 3.1 will be open-sourced. Users can access it through AWS, Nvidia, Groq, Dell, Databricks, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other model libraries. AWS vice president for AI Matt Wood told VentureBeat that Llama 3.1 will be available on both AWS Bedrock and Sagemaker. AWS customers can fine-tune Llama 3.1 models through its services and add additional guardrails. "Customers can use all of the publicly available goodness of Llama and do all sorts of interesting things with these models, take them apart, and put them back together again with all the tools available on AWS," Wood said. Llama 3.1 405B will also be available on WhatsApp and Meta AI.

Meta inches toward open source AI with new LLaMA 3.1

Meta, Facebook's parent company, has announced a new open-source AI program called LLaMA 3.1 405B. Behind the name that only a programmer could love lies a new, more powerful large language model (LLM) that will power Meta AI assistant, which is baked into many of Meta's end-user programs. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled LLaMA 3.1 in a post on Threads, proclaiming, "open-source AI is the path forward." In an interview with Rundown.ai, Zuckerberg added, "Open models are going to be the standard, and I think that it's going to be good for the world. It's a bit soul-crushing when you go build features that are what you believe is good for your community, and then you're told that you can't ship them because some company wants to put you in a box so that they can better compete with you." Also: Copilot Pro vs. ChatGPT Plus: Which AI chatbot is worth your $20 a month? Does this mean that LLaMa 3.1 is really open source? The answer matters. As Neal Gompa, a Linux developer, asked on Mastodon, "Does that mean LLaMA 3 is under an OSI [Open Source Initiative]-approved open-source license, unlike its predecessors? We couldn't ship LLaMA 2 in Fedora because of its lack of use of an OSI-approved open-source license." The answer is no. OSI executive director Stefano Maffulli told me in an interview, "In theory, we agree with all that Zuck wrote and said. If only Meta's license would remove the restrictions and Meta released full details about their training datasets and the training instructions, we'd be 100% in sync." "As it stands now," Maffulli continued, "Llama is a liability for any developer; too opaque to be safe to use and with a license that ultimately leaves Meta in charge of their innovations." Stephen O'Grady, a RedMonk industry analyst, agreed. "It's welcome news that Meta has dropped some of the use restrictions around Llama, but as long as it still restricts which companies can use the software, as the new license does, it's clearly and inarguably not open source. If Linux, for example, were released under this license, Meta would be entitled to use it, but companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft could not. That's not open source, nor would we accept it." Also: The best AI image generators: Tested and reviewed According to Zuckerberg, moving beyond the open-source issues to the technology, the new model is designed to be more efficient and powerful than its predecessors. It offers enhanced capabilities for various applications, from natural language processing to complex data analysis. In particular, he believes the Meta way is better than Apple's AI approach. The new LLaMA boasts a 405 billion parameter model, making it one of the most sophisticated AI models available. That's still much smaller than ChatGPT 4.0, with its 1.8 trillion parameters. That said, it's still a significant upgrade. It is expected to improve performance in language translation, content generation, and scientific research. Zuckerberg claims LLMA 3.1 is "competitive with some of the leading closed models, and in some areas, it's even ahead." Meta's benchmarking shows that LLaMA is competitive with leading foundation models, including GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, across various tasks. He also states, "By our estimates, it's going to be 50% cheaper, I think, than GPT-4 to do inference directly on the 405B model." The new model is available today from more than 25 partners, including AWS, NVIDIA, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, and Google Cloud. Meta also stated that it comes ready with support for such popular AI tools as vLLM, TensorRT, and PyTorch, so developers can immediately get to work with LLaMA 3.1

Meta Unveils Llama 3.1, Challenging Closed-Source AI Giants

Meta has challenged the artificial intelligence status quo by releasing Llama 3.1, unveiling a 405 billion parameter open-source model that aims to rival closed-source AI leaders. In a Tuesday (July 23) news release, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the company's commitment to open-source AI, saying, "The new Llama 3.1 models are a super-important step for open-source AI. With NVIDIA AI Foundry, companies can easily create and customize the state-of-the-art AI services people want and deploy them with NVIDIA NIM." Richard Gardner, CEO of Modulus, previously told PYMNTS that open-source AI models like Llama could increase competition and potentially reduce costs for businesses, with the focus shifting to the quality of training data and expertise in applying these models. Meta claims that Llama 3.1 405B is the world's largest and most capable openly available foundation model. The company says it rivals top AI models in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use and multilingual translation. Nvidia is leveraging Meta's open-source approach by integrating Llama 3.1 into its new AI Foundry service. "Llama 3.1 opens the floodgates for every enterprise and industry to build state-of-the-art generative AI applications. NVIDIA AI Foundry has integrated Llama 3.1 throughout and is ready to help enterprises build and deploy custom Llama supermodels," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a Tuesday news release. Meta is expanding the Llama ecosystem with new tools and partnerships. The company is releasing a reference system that includes sample applications and new components such as Llama Guard 3, a multilingual safety model, and Prompt Guard, a prompt injection filter. Llama 3.1 is poised to reshape commerce across the board. By making advanced AI accessible to businesses of all sizes, it levels the playing field in a way that could spark widespread innovation. Small retailers can now harness the same caliber of AI as major corporations for tasks like customer service and inventory management. Financial firms might deploy more nuanced risk assessment tools, while manufacturers could fine-tune their supply chains with unprecedented precision. This democratization of AI technology opens doors for personalized marketing, streamlined operations, and AI-driven product development that was once the domain of tech giants alone. The release of Llama 3.1 could reshape the AI landscape by providing open access to frontier-level AI capabilities. Jeremy Barnes, VP of AI Product at ServiceNow, noted in a Tuesday Nvidia blog post, "Organizations deploying AI can gain a competitive edge with custom models that incorporate industry and business knowledge." Meta is also proposing the "Llama Stack," a set of standardized interfaces for building AI components and applications, aiming to foster easier interoperability across the AI ecosystem. Zuckerberg argued in an open letter that open-source AI is the future, drawing parallels to the evolution of operating systems: "Today, Linux is the industry standard foundation for both cloud computing and the operating systems that run most mobile devices -- and we all benefit from superior products because of it." He believes open-source AI offers several advantages for developers and organizations, including the ability to "train, fine-tune, and distill our own models" and "control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor." Zuckerberg also said Llama 3.1 is cost-effective, saying developers can run inference "at roughly 50% the cost of using closed models like GPT-4o." Addressing concerns about giving away technological advantages, Zuckerberg argues that "open sourcing any given model isn't giving away a massive advantage over the next best models at that point in time." He said Meta's business model isn't based on selling access to AI models, unlike closed providers. On AI safety, Zuckerberg believes "open source AI will be safer than the alternatives" due to increased transparency and scrutiny. He asserts that widespread deployment of AI is crucial for security: "I think it will be better to live in a world where AI is widely deployed so that larger actors can check the power of smaller bad actors." Zuckerberg concludes by calling the Llama 3.1 release "an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source," and invites developers to join Meta in "this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world."

Meta's New Llama 3.1 AI Model Is Free, Powerful, and Risky

Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses. But Mark Zuckerberg is giving away what Meta considers to be one of the world's best AI models for free. Meta released the biggest, most capable version of a large language model called Llama on Monday, free of charge. Meta has not disclosed the cost of developing Llama 3.1 but Zuckerberg recently told investors that his company is spending billions on AI development. Through this latest release, Meta is showing that the closed approach favored by most AI companies is not the only way to develop AI. But the company is also putting itself at the center of debate around the dangers posed by releasing AI without controls. Meta trains Llama in a way that prevents the model from producing harmful output by default, but the model can be modified to remove such safeguards. Meta says that Llama 3.1 is as clever and useful as the best commercial offerings from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. In certain benchmarks that measure progress in AI, Meta says the model is the smartest AI on Earth. "It's very exciting," says Percy Liang, an associate professor at Stanford University who tracks open source AI. If developers find the new model to be just as capable as the industry's leading ones, including OpenAI's GPT-4o, Liang says, it could see many move over to Meta's offering. "It will be interesting to see how the usage shifts," he says. In an open letter posted with the release of the new model, Meta's CEO Zuckerberg compared Llama to the open source Linux operating system. When Linux took off in the late 90s and early 2000s many big tech companies were invested in closed alternatives and criticized open source software as risky and unreliable. Today however Linux is widely used in cloud computing and serves as the core of the Android mobile OS. "I believe that AI will develop in a similar way," Zuckerberg writes in his letter. "Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed models. But open source is quickly closing the gap." However, Meta's decision to give away its AI is not devoid of self interest. Previous Llama releases have helped the company secure an influential position among AI researchers, developers, and startups. Liang also notes that Llama 3.1 is not truly open source because Meta imposes restrictions on its usage, for example limiting the scale at which the model can be used in commercial products. The new version of Llama has 405 billion parameters or tweakable elements. Meta has already released two smaller versions of Llama 3, one with 70 billion parameters and another with 8 billion. Meta today also released upgraded versions of these models branded as Llama 3.1. Llama 3.1 is too big to be run on a regular computer but Meta says that many cloud providers, including Databricks, Groq, AWS, and Google Cloud, will offer hosting options to allow developers to run custom versions of the model. The model can also be accessed at Meta.ai.

Yann LeCun says Meta AI 'quickly becoming most used' assistant, challenging OpenAI's dominance

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Meta Platforms has thrown down the gauntlet in the AI race today with the release of Llama 3.1, its most sophisticated artificial intelligence model to date. This advanced model now powers Meta AI, the company's AI assistant, which has been strategically deployed across its suite of platforms including WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban Meta, with plans to extend to Meta Quest next month. The widespread implementation of Llama 3.1 potentially places advanced AI capabilities at the fingertips of billions of users globally. The move represents a direct challenge to industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, particularly targeting OpenAI's market-leading position. It also underscores Meta's commitment to open-source development, marking a major escalation in the AI competition. Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, made a bold proclamation on X.com following the release this morning that caught many in the AI community off guard. "Llama 3.1 now powers Meta AI, which is quickly becoming the most widely used AI assistant," LeCun said, directly challenging the supremacy of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has thus far dominated the AI assistant market. If substantiated, LeCun's assertion could herald a major shift in the AI landscape, potentially reshaping the future of AI accessibility and development. Open-source vs. Closed-source: Meta's disruptive strategy in the AI market The centerpiece of Meta's release is the Llama 3.1 405B model, featuring 405 billion parameters. The company boldly contends that this model's performance rivals that of leading closed-source models, including OpenAI's GPT-4o, across various tasks. Meta's decision to make such a powerful model openly available stands in stark contrast to the proprietary approaches of its competitors, particularly OpenAI. This release comes at a critical juncture for Meta, following a $200 billion market value loss earlier this year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted the company's focus towards AI, moving away from its previous emphasis on the metaverse. "Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI," Zuckerberg said, in what appears to be a direct challenge to OpenAI's business model. Wall Street analysts have expressed skepticism about Meta's open-source strategy, questioning its potential for monetization, especially when compared to OpenAI's reported $3.4 billion annualized revenue. However, the tech community has largely welcomed the move, seeing it as a catalyst for innovation and wider AI access. AI arms race heats up: Implications for innovation, safety, and market leadership The new model boasts improvements including an extended context length of 128,000 tokens, enhanced multilingual capabilities, and improved reasoning. Meta has also introduced the "Llama Stack," a set of standardized interfaces aimed at simplifying development with Llama models, potentially making it easier for developers to switch from OpenAI's tools. While the release has generated excitement in the AI community, it also raises concerns about potential misuse. Meta claims to have implemented robust safety measures, but the long-term implications of widely available advanced AI remain a topic of debate among experts. As the AI race intensifies, Meta's latest move positions the company as a formidable competitor in a field previously dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic. The success of Llama 3.1 could potentially reshape the AI industry, influencing everything from market dynamics to development methodologies. The tech industry is closely watching this development, with many speculating on how OpenAI and other AI leaders will respond to Meta's direct challenge. As the competition heats up, the implications for AI accessibility, innovation, and market leadership remain to be seen, with OpenAI's dominant position now under serious threat.