The company announced on Tuesday that the commercial version of the open-source artificial intelligence model Llama from Meta will soon be accessible.
According to Meta in a blog post, Microsoft is “our preferred partner” for the distribution of the new model, codenamed Llama 2, which will run on Windows and be distributed through Azure.
The model, which Meta previously only provided to specific academics for research purposes, will also be made accessible by direct download and through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other providers, according to the blog post and another Facebook post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In the words of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “Open source drives innovation because it empowers many more developers to build with new technology.” I believe that greater advancements would be made if the ecosystem were more open.
The early market supremacy attained by players like OpenAI, whose models Microsoft sponsors and which it already makes available to commercial clients via Azure, is threatened by making a model as complicated as Llama generally accessible for free for startups to build on.
Amjad Masad, CEO of the software development platform Replit, claims that more than 80% of projects there make use of OpenAI models. Commercial Llama might alter the situation, he said.
According to Masad, open-source models are reducing the market share of closed-source models since they require less reliance and have lower operating costs.
The information was released shortly after Alphabet’s Google and Amazon revealed their intentions to provide business clients with a selection of AI models. These businesses are Microsoft’s main competitors in the cloud.
For instance, Amazon is marketing access to Claude, an AI developed by the well-known startup Anthropic, in addition to its own family of Titan models. The same is true for Google, which has said it plans to provide Claude and other models to its cloud users.
Up until now, Microsoft has focused on making OpenAI technology available on Azure.
A Microsoft spokesperson was asked why the company would sponsor a product that would diminish the value of OpenAI, and the representative said that allowing developers to choose the models they want to use will help the business keep its position as the top cloud platform for AI projects.
a business memo
Meta’s robust open-source ecosystem of artificial intelligence technology built using its models may frustrate competitors’ plans to monetize their proprietary technology, which would lose value if developers could use similarly effective open-source systems for free.
When a leaked internal Google letter with the subject line “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” foretold this kind of scenario in May, the tech sector was stunned.
Meta is also betting that it will profit from any upgrades, bug fixes, and products that arise from its method being the norm for AI research, just like it has done over the past few years with its widely used open source AI framework PyTorch.
According to a statement made by Zuckerberg to investors in April, as a social media company, Meta has more to gain from effectively crowdsourcing ways to reduce infrastructure costs and maximise the creation of new consumer-facing tools that might attract users to its ad-supported services.
Unlike many other companies in the industry, Zuckerberg noted, “We’re not selling a cloud computing service where we try to keep the different software infrastructure that we’re building proprietary.”
“It’s much better for us if the business standardises on the basic tools that we’re using so that we can benefit from the advancements that others make.”
Llamas being released into the wild poses questions, though, as it makes it simpler for dishonest people to produce things with no regard for safety precautions.
Because it produced offensive text, a chatbot developed by Stanford researchers for $600 using a modified version of the original Llama model was removed in April.
According to executives at Meta, releasing technology to the public actually reduces safety concerns by leveraging the population’s intelligence to identify problems and improve system resilience.
Furthermore, the company asserts that it has created an “acceptable use” policy for commercial Llama that prohibits “certain use cases,” such as violent crimes, acts of terrorism, child exploitation, and other unlawful activities.
