Thanks to the viral sensation of OpenAI's talkative chatbot, it's now an arms race of generative AIs.
The AI field was dull and quiet, and the buzz it created mostly happened within its own field, and rarely reach far beyond its own audience. But when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT as a AI chatbot tool, the internet was quickly captivated.
Meta responded with LLaMA, and later, with LLaMA 2.
The company said it has initially released the first two models of the current version, featuring 8B and 70B parameters (8 billion and 70 billion parameters, respectively), with upcoming models slated to feature 400B parameters (400 billion parameters).
Meta emphasized that LLaMA 3 was trained with a "large, high-quality training dataset" featuring over 15 trillion tokens, 7x larger than LLaMA 2, and featuring 4x more code.
LLaMA 3 also features filtering techniques, including NSFW filters, to ensure data quality.
Introducing Meta Llama 3: the most capable openly available LLM to date.
Today we’re releasing 8B & 70B models that deliver on new capabilities such as improved reasoning and set a new state-of-the-art for models of their sizes.
Today's release includes the first two Llama 3… pic.twitter.com/Q80lVTeS7m— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) April 18, 2024
In an announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:
According to Meta, LLaMA 3 is described as a "major leap" over its predecessor.
Zuckerberg explained that LLaMA 3 outperforms LLaMA 2, and also claims that it surpasses competing models such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and OpenAI’s Chat GPT-3.5, in more than half the time across 12 use cases.
The company plans to deploy LLaMA 3 "everywhere," including on all major cloud providers, model API providers, and other services.
LLaMA 3 is aimed at developers, but Meta said that it has launched ways for end users to access AI services.
For starters, Meta is showcasing LLaMA 3 through a dedicated website.
Meta also said it's introducing a LLaMA 3-powered AI assistant, called the Meta AI, which can be used "to do everything from research, planning a trip with your group chat, writing a photo caption and more."
The company has integrated the AI into the search bar of its Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger apps, and can also be accessed when scrolling through the main Facebook feed.
Furthermore, the company also offers the service via Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in the U.S. and plans to extend it to its Meta Quest VR headset.
Want to experience Llama 3 right now? Starting today, our latest models have been integrated into Meta AI — which is now rolling out to even more countries, available across our family of apps and a new home on the web.
Experience it on https://t.co/SSo3nt3D0w pic.twitter.com/dtbuSD3FRl— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) April 18, 2024
News of Meta’s expanded AI products comes shortly after upgrades to competing services. ChatGPT upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo on April 11, while Microsoft Copilot upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo starting in March, advancing the race between consumer-oriented AI services.
The first releases of LLaMA 3 are text-based models.
However, future releases will be multilingual and multimodal. The models should also be able to process longer context and demonstrate better performance in reasoning and coding, which Meta described as "core LLM capabilities."