“The pace has been incredible — incredibly quick decision-making, really tight loops, really focused execution to lead up to this Llama 2 moment,” said Ahmad Al Dahle, vice president of Meta’s generative AI group. “We had over a hundred thousand requests for Llama 1. So we went back to the drawing board, brought our teams together, and made a ton of investments on alignment and research and safety in order to build a model that we felt was ready.”

The partnership aligns Meta more closely with Microsoft, which has emerged as the clear leader in AI through its investment and technology partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which charges for access to its model. Much like tech peers Google and Microsoft, the social media company has long had a big research team of computer scientists devoted to advancing AI technology. But it’s been overshadowed as the release of ChatGPT sparked a rush to profit off of “generative AI” tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Microsoft’s tie-up with OpenAI doesn’t concern Meta, says Al Dahle. He said Llama 2, being open-sourced, can provide the opportunity for small- and medium-sized businesses to more quickly test and use LLMs without owning the servers and computing power to host their own custom model.

Large language models, or LLMs, power text-based chatbots, though their uses aren’t limited to helping AI answer questions. The models are trained by being fed immense amounts of information, usually from the internet, to refine a process for generating responses.

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Meta will also be opening Llama 2 access for academic researchers.

Previously, the company developed PyTorch, an AI framework, to be accessible to all and eventually spun it out to be overseen by the nonprofit Linux Foundation.

Bloomberg, AP

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