Meta opened in “open source” (free access to the programming code) and free access to its Llama 2 language model to companies and researchers. For the first time, the model can be used for commercial purposes.
Llama 2 is a competitor of GPT-4, the great Open AI language model, used by the chatbot ChatGPT and Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Llama 2 was trained with 40% more data than the first version of the Llama model. Three model sizes are available: 7, 13 or 70 billion parameters It will be available in particular via the main cloud platforms Azure (Microsoft) and AWS (Amazon).
“By making AI models widely available, they can benefit everyone…and we believe it’s safer,” Meta said in a statement.
The first to go in the mad race for generative AI started since the release of ChatGPT, Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI, and Google currently dominate the market. Since then, not only have all the major technology players been involved, but the open source community is also in the running.
Notably thanks to Meta, which was the first to provide access to the source code of the first large LlaMA language model version in the spring. “Giving corporations, start-ups, entrepreneurs and researchers access to tools they would struggle to build on their own at this scale, with computing capabilities they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, will opening up a world of opportunities for them to experiment and innovate,” assures Meta.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram made the announcement during a marketing event for Microsoft, which is becoming its “main partner for Llama 2” through its Azure cloud platform. Microsoft is thus also taking a position on the side of open source AI.
For its part, Microsoft has indicated that Copilot, its new AI tool for its Microsoft 365 office suite, will be billed at $30 per month per user. This virtual assistant transcribes meetings, offers summaries and above all has access to emails, calendar, contacts and documents to write texts and perform tasks on request.
“We believe that within three years, more than 50% of Microsoft’s user base will be using the company’s game-changing enterprise AI,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives. The revenue prospects of this new subscription propelled Microsoft stock to the highest level in its history on Wall Street.
