Meet ChatGPT's New Rival Meta's Llama 2

Meta released a commercial version of its open-source artificial intelligence model Llamaon Tuesday. This is designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences.

"We believe an open approach is the right one for the development of today's AI models, especially those in the generative space where the technology is rapidly advancing. By making AI models available openly, they can benefit everyone. Giving businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, and researchers access to tools developed at a scale that would be challenging to build themselves, backed by computing power they might not otherwise access, will open up a world of opportunities for them to experiment, innovate in exciting ways, and ultimately benefit from economically and socially," the company said in a statement.

Meta has partnered with Microsoft to introduce the next generation of its AI large language model which will be free for research and commercial use. It will compete with Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Meta has a long history of open-sourcing its infrastructure and AI work -- from PyTorch, the leading machine learning framework, to models like Segment Anything, ImageBind, and Dino, to basic infrastructure as part of the Open Compute Project. "This has helped us build better products by driving progress across the industry," he said.

Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues, the Meta CEO stated.

"I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we're open-sourcing Llama 2. Today we're releasing pretrained and fine-tuned models with 7B, 13B, and 70B parameters. Llama 2 was pretrained on 40% more data than Llama 1 and has improvements to its architecture. For the fine-tuned models, we collected more than 1 million human annotations and applied supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) with leading results on safety and quality," he explained.

People can download these models directly, or through Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure. Netizens can also use its optimized version which can run locally on Windows.