Meta unveils its ChatGPT rival Llama

Meta has unveiled its new artificial intelligence system “Llama 2” rivalling the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

The Facebook parent company’s chief Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that the new AI system, created after partnering with Microsoft, is free to use for research and commercial purposes in contrast to its competitors.

Microsoft also said it aims to “democratise AI and its benefits” with the launch of Llama 2. A previous version known as Llama, had been launched in February, but leaked onto the internet in March and was tinkered with by the public since.

Compared to some of their Big Tech rivals developing large AI language models, Meta and Microsoft said they seek to provide “an open approach”, offering researchers and companies a peek into the data and code they use to build their AI.

“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,” Meta noted in a blog post.

“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 tech giant noted.

The new AI system Llama 2 is in contrast with other chatbots like ChatGPT by OpenAI and Bard by Google that are not open source.

“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” Mr Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

“It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we’re open sourcing Llama 2,” he said.

However, despite Meta’s claims of open-sourcing its new AI system, the data it used to build Llama 2 still remains unclear.

A research paper released along with the new model says it was trained on “a new mix of data from publicly available sources, which does not include data from Meta’s products or services”, but does not mention specifically what data was used.

The paper, however, noted that Meta removed data from websites containing a “high volume of personal information about private individuals”.

The new AI models can be directly downloaded or via a partnership, which makes them available on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, Meta said.

“Starting today, Llama 2 is available in the Azure AI model catalog, enabling developers using Microsoft Azure to build with it and leverage their cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features,” it said.

“It is also optimized to run locally on Windows, giving developers a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to customers across different platforms,” it said.

Llama 2 is also available via Microsoft’s rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Hugging Face, among other providers, Meta said.