Meta Releases Its Latest AI Model --- Company plans to integrate Llama 3 into Facebook, other social-media apps

 

"Meta Platforms released Llama 3, the latest edition of its publicly available large language model, as the AI battle continues to escalate.

The company's new AI capabilities will be used to upgrade its Meta AI tool, which it will feature more prominently in its apps. They will be integrated into the search functions of its major platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The upgraded tool will be able to summarize links. Meta AI will be available via the web at meta.ai.

Meta is releasing two versions of the model to start, including an 8 billion-parameter model and another with 70 billion parameters. Parameters are the term for the variables in an AI system that are used to measure a model's size and capabilities. The company said the smallest version of Llama 3 is as powerful as the largest version of its predecessor. The company also will be using its Llama 3 model to upgrade its Meta AI assistant chatbot.

"Based on the benchmarks we're looking at today, this is going to be the most intelligent and best performative model of its kind that's freely available," Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said.

OpenAI kicked off Silicon Valley's AI race in late 2022 when it launched its innovative ChatGPT chatbot. Since then, more companies, both startups and established tech titans, have entered the fray.

In July, Meta publicly launched Llama 2, and it released the first version of its Meta AI chatbot in September within Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Unlike others in the space, Meta launched its model as "open source" software, meaning that others can use it and modify it for free.

Meta said it would release more Llama 3 models over the coming months with additional capabilities, including the ability to converse in several languages. The company is working on an even larger model of 400 billion parameters that it will release after the company has completed its training, Cox said. OpenAI hasn't disclosed the size of GPT-4, but it has been estimated to be 1.5 trillion parameters.

If Meta can steer its billions of users toward its AI offerings, the company may be able to build advertising into its model and also potentially sell other paid services, said Debra Aho Williamson, chief analyst of Sonata Insights. "I believe that most consumer-facing AI experiences will eventually include some form of paid advertising, such as sponsored results that appear during the course of a chatbot conversation," she said.

With the launch of Llama 3, Meta AI will be able to do more, and it will roll out to 13 more English-speaking markets, including Australia and Canada. It won't be available in the European Union at launch.

"It's going to be a lot more powerful and a lot more intelligent," Cox said. He added that the link summary feature could be helpful for the company's users when they come across long-form content.

Meta AI's image-generation feature, called Emu, will be upgraded to more quickly produce results that will be of higher quality and show users preview results as they type out their query.

When it comes to generative AI, Meta is focused on democratizing these AI breakthroughs for free for its users, Cox said.

"What we've tried to do as a company is make the tools work for everyone everywhere," Cox said. He added that the company would consider a monthly subscription model like OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus and Google One AI Premium when larger versions of Llama become available.

Notably, Meta used synthetic data, meaning text generated by other AI models, to train Llama 3. As tech companies run out of data with which to train their AI models, they are having to come up with solutions for how to acquire or create more data." [1]

1. Meta Releases Its Latest AI Model --- Company plans to integrate Llama 3 into Facebook, other social-media apps. Rodriguez, Salvador; Stern, Joanna.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Apr 2024: B.4.