Meta opens AI model for commercial use and offers free alternative – 07/19/2023 – Tech

Meta on Tuesday launched a commercial version of its open-source artificial intelligence model Llama, the company announced, giving startups and other companies a powerful free alternative to the models sold by OpenAI and Google.

The new version of the model, called Llama 2, will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, Meta said in a statement, referring to Microsoft as “our preferred partner” for the launch. .

The model, previously provided by Meta only to selected academics for research purposes, will also be made available via download and through providers such as Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face, according to a statement and a separate Facebook post from the chief executive of Meta. Goal, Mark Zuckerberg.

“Open source drives innovation because it allows many more developers to build with new technology,” wrote Zuckerberg. “I believe there would be more progress if the ecosystem was more open.”

Making a model as sophisticated as Llama widely available and free to businesses threatens to overthrow the initial dominance established in the nascent market of generative AI software by players like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, whose models are already offered to enterprise customers.

The announcement follows plans by biggest cloud rivals Microsoft, Google, Alphabet, and Amazon to offer enterprise customers a variety of AI models to choose from.

Meta is also betting that it will benefit from advancements, bug fixes and products that can grow from its model, becoming the standard for AI innovation, as it has done in recent years with its PyTorch open source AI framework.