Meta takes open-source approach
Firm also prioritizes native Hindi support to counter OpenAI, Google
Meta unveiled its latest generation of Llama 3.1 foundational artificial intelligence (AI) models on Tuesday. Amid a routine upgrade, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg emphasized expanding localized, vernacular use cases and focusing on promoting open-source development to rope in enterprises.
Industry stakeholders believe such an approach may help Meta rival OpenAI’s GPT-AI models, widely considered the top foundational AI platform globally.
In an interview with Mint, Ragavan Srinivasan, Meta’s vice-president of product and the head of Llama models, said its open-source approach to AI will define its approach to generative AI for enterprises.
“Building AI models as open source is good for developers, Meta and the world in general, as we’ve seen with our work on Pytorch and
React. Rivals of Llama are all proprietary, which means that enterprises have to develop their AI applications based on the terms defined by the companies making the models. As generative AI becomes integrated into the internet, we’d look to provide open intelligence in order to ensure that a rich developer and partner ecosystem builds around Llama,” Srinivasan said.
Srinivasan’s statement on the latest models, which natively support processing of queries and inferences in
Hindi (among other languages), echoes Tuesday’s post by Zuckerberg on expanding its open-source approach.
“We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open-source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. In addition to having significantly better cost and performance relative to closed models, the fact that the 405B model is open will make it the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling smaller models,” the executive said in a blog post.
Industry stakeholders largely welcomed the move. Kashyap Kompella, chief executive of AI research and consultancy firm RPA2AI Research, said Meta’s push for AI is multi-pronged.
“Meta is looking to be the opensource evangelist in the generative AI space, which can help it rival companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Anthropic in offering one of the top five foundational AI models globally. Meta’s key strength is that it can use its own models within its core social media services, which means that it does not necessarily need to monetize the models themselves. This is something that OpenAI cannot— since their core offering are the AI models, they will need to look at a direct monetization model instead,” he said.
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