Meta’s Llama 2 is an open-source rival to ChatGPT

Meta is making its Llama 2 large language model open source, Facebook’s parent company announced on July 18. An update of the model, which was released in February 2023 as the first generation LLAMA (also styled as Llama 1). Revealed at the Microsoft Inspire event. Microsoft will be a preferred partner with META on Llama 2.

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What is Llama 2?

Llama 2 is a large language model that can be used to build generative and conversational AI models. Simply put, Llama 2, like GPT-4, can be used to build chatbots and AI assistants for commercial or research purposes.

It runs on a collection of pre-trained and fine-tuned generic text models that vary in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters, and 2 trillion tokens of data from publicly available sources went into its pre-training. Overall, this is 40% more than the tokens used to train the original Llama.

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Where is Llama 2 available?

Llama 2 can be downloaded from meta here for research and commercial use. Available open-source resources include model weights and beginner’s code for pre-trained models, as well as fine-tuned versions of conversational AI.

“Opening up access to today’s AI models means a generation of developers and researchers can test them as a community, identify problems and solve them faster,” Meta wrote in a blog post about Llama 2. , our own teams can learn from them, improve those tools, and fix vulnerabilities.

Developers who already have accounts with Microsoft’s Azure AI Model Catalog will be able to access Llama 2 from there. It can be found on Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other AI marketplaces. AWS customers should find it in SageMaker, the machine learning marketplace.

“Meta’s announcement of the model being available in AWS and Microsoft Azure is a big step forward for them, showing their ambition to become an enterprise player in the generative AI space,” Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran commented in an email to TechRepublic.

Meta partners with Qualcomm for on-device AI

Qualcomm will install Lama 2 on select devices in 2024. The exact device models that this will apply to have not been revealed yet, but Qualcomm has said that these will be devices powered by Snapdragon processors. Qualcomm aims to make the language model run directly on some devices, not always in the cloud.

“We appreciate Meta’s vision for open and responsible AI and how it’s helping to drive innovation and break down barriers to entry for developers of any size by bringing generative AI to devices,” said Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager of technology. Committed to reducing Qualcomm’s plan and edge solutions in a press release. “To effectively mainstream generative AI, AI will need to run both in the cloud and on devices at the edge, such as smartphones, laptops, vehicles and IoT devices.”

What does Llama 2 say about the competition in the generic AI business sector?

Opening Llama 2 and partnering with Microsoft may indicate that Meta is trying to stay competitive with GPT-4. OpenAI’s GPT-4 is also free to use and is the model behind ChatGPT, which Microsoft has bet heavily on. Google also has a horse with the PaLM model behind Bard.

“This is going to change the landscape of the LLM market,” said Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist. on Twitter,

How the connection with META might change Microsoft’s deals with OpenAI is not yet clear, but “partnering with META could open up new opportunities for them,” Chandrasekaran said. “The Llama 2 models could potentially drive demand for Azure’s IaaS and operational tools as customers look to optimize these models and build business applications on top of them,” he added.

Making the model open source could also be a big change. “By releasing Llama 2 and licensing it for commercial use, Meta can provide a huge boost to the open-source community,” Chandrasekaran said. “Today, closed-source models arguably have a performance advantage over open-source models, but Llama has the potential to narrow that gap over the mid- to long-term.”