Facebook’s parent company, MetaPlatforms, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system called Llama 2, which competes with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, but with a unique twist – to be released for free.
Meta’s move allows startups and businesses to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard at a lower cost. Microsoft will distribute Llama 2 through its Azure cloud service, citing Microsoft as its “preferred partner” for the Meta release.
Llama 2 is part of Meta’s larger Language Model (LLM) series, which underpins creative AI products like ChatGPT.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the technology would be available for both research and commercial use, emphasizing the company’s commitment to openness and innovation.
Meta aims to differentiate itself from other tech giants by being more transparent in sharing the data and code it uses to develop AI systems. Zuckerberg believes that open source models encourage innovation and improve safety and security. In keeping with this philosophy, Meta drew on open-sourcing Llama 2 and its history of open-sourcing AI work, including the widely used machine learning framework PyTorch.
However, the research paper introducing Llama 2 is less transparent than Meta’s previous work, omitting details about the specific data used for training. The model was trained on a combination of publicly available data excluding Meta’s own products or services. In particular, data from websites containing sensitive personal information was removed.
Meta will make its AI models available for download directly or through Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed, but Meta confirmed that the models will also be accessible through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other platforms. Although Microsoft is labeled as a “preferred” partner, it’s worth noting that Microsoft is also a major funder and partner of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.
In addition to the Llama 2 announcement, Microsoft revealed at its Inspire event that it will charge businesses $30 per user per month for its generative AI tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot.
