Meta Platforms, Inc., formerly known as Facebook, has unveiled a new research tool called the Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) that is expected to give the company an edge in building AI-based chatbots. The California-based tech giant has released LLaMA as a state-of-the-art foundational language model to aid researchers in the subfield of AI. This is the company’s third LLM after Glactica and Blender Bot 3, which were shut down following incorrect results. LLaMA is a collection of language models ranging from 7B to 65B parameters, and according to Meta, it will likely solve issues concerning AI language models.
LLaMA is not essentially a chatbot, but rather a research tool that will enable researchers to explore new use cases. The models are trained on trillions of tokens using public datasets, which Meta claims will democratize access to the fast-changing field of AI. According to Meta, training smaller foundational models such as LLaMA is ideal, as they require significantly low computing power and resources to test, validate and explore new use cases.
Foundational language models are known to train on large chunks of unlabeled data, which makes them ideal for customization according to various tasks. Meta has stated that it will offer LLaMA in sizes such as 7B, 13B, 33B, and 65B parameters. In its research paper, the company noted that LLaMA-13B outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-3 (175B) on most benchmarks, and LLaMA-65B is competitive with the best models, DeepMind’s Chinchilla70B and Google’s PaLM-540B.
Meta has plans to make LLaMA available to researchers, although it is currently not in use on any of the company’s products. The company has also made the LLaMA model source code available for outsiders to see how the system works, which will let them customize and collaborate on related projects.
Large language models or LLMs are AI systems that consume massive volumes of digital text from internet sources such as articles, news reports, and social media posts. These digital texts are used to train software that predicts and produces content from scratch based on prompts and queries. LLMs can help in tasks such as writing essays, composing social media posts, suggesting programming code, and generating chatbot conversations.
Meta’s release of LLaMA comes at a time when the company was largely absent from the chatter surrounding the revolutionary AI chatbots. It had been one of the first to release its own chatbots, but owing to incorrect results and a lackluster response, its plans went awry. With LLaMa, Meta seems to have hurled itself back into the game.
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Meta is committed to this open research model and we will make our new model available to the AI research community,” said Zuckerberg.
“To maintain the integrity and prevent misuse, we are releasing our model under a non-commercial license focused on search use cases,” the company said in a statement.
“Access to the model will be granted on a case-by-case basis to academic researchers; those affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia; and industry research labs around the world.”
With the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, other tech companies are eyeing opportunities in the industry. This is the case of Google, which launched Bard, which uses information from the internet to provide answers.
Microsoft, which is partnered with OpenAI, is bringing innovation to its products. The technology behind ChatGPT is already on the Bing search engine and will soon be available on Teams.
