Meta AI, Meta’s open source generative AI tool, is powered by the more robust Llama 3 large-scale language model, the company announced in a press release Thursday.
There are two varieties of Llama 3 available. One is Llama 3 8B with 8 billion parameters and the other is Llama 3 70B with 70 billion parameters. In general, the more parameters an AI model has, the better the output. Meta’s goal is to create the best open models available that can compete with the best proprietary AI models on the market. Meta said these models are open source so the company can engage the community as he develops his AI models. For now, Llama 3 is just a text-based model, but Meta hopes that in the future it will be multilingual and multimodal with reasoning and coding capabilities.
Meta said that in benchmark tests, Llama 3 8B outperformed Mistral and Google’s two other open source AIs, Mistral 7B and Gemma 7B, respectively. Mehta said the Llama 3 70B performed better than the new Google Gemini Pro 1.5 and Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet. Sonnet is not his Anthropic’s strongest model, and he should note that CNET has not independently verified his Meta claims. Meta announced that the Llama 3 70B beat out his Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 in his unique human assessment test.
Meta’s strong pivot to artificial intelligence comes after OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in late 2022, leaving the rest of Big Tech at a standstill. The ChatGPT chatbot became one of the first examples of how the average consumer could interact with an AI model that would seemingly give them answers. Every question with a unique answer. At MetaConnect last September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an AI chatbot, an AI image generator, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses based on celebrities such as Snoop Dogg. The company announced a number of AI products, including a new AI character.
Meta has been and continues to invest heavily in virtual reality and the Metaverse, but it has since doubled down on social media, which is its primary revenue source. Combined with the AI investment, Meta’s stock price rose to an all-time high of $531 per share earlier this month. Zuckerberg also overtook Tesla CEO Elon Musk to become the third richest person in the world.
Commenting on Llama 3’s security, Mehta said the company has adopted a “new system-level approach to the responsible development and deployment of Llama.” This system uses both humans and automation to push the model to provide “problematic responses” and continuously adjust the model to disallow those outputs.
Mehta said Rama 3 will be introduced soon and will use fewer resources than Rama 2 despite having more parameters. Meta AI can be found on the web and as part of Meta-owned platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
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