Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses, but Mark Zuckerberg is giving away what Meta considers one of the best AI models in the world.
Meta on Monday released the largest and most capable version of a large language model called Llama, for free. Meta has not disclosed the development cost of Llama 3.1, but Zuckerberg said it would cost $1.99 to develop it. Investors were recently told that his company is spending billions on AI development.
With this latest release, Meta is showing that the closed approach favored by most AI companies isn’t the only way to develop AI. But the company is also putting itself at the center of the debate over the dangers of releasing AI without controls. Meta trains Llama in a way that prevents the model from producing harmful results by default, but the model can be modified to remove those safeguards.
Meta claims Llama 3.1 is as smart and useful as the best commercial offerings from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. On certain benchmarks that measure progress in AI, Meta claims the model is the smartest AI on the planet.
“It’s very exciting,” he says. Percy Liangassociate professor at Stanford University who tracks open-source AI. If developers find the new model as capable as industry leaders, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Liang says, many could switch to Meta’s offering. “It will be interesting to see how usage changes,” he says.
In a open letter In a statement released with the launch of the new model, Meta CEO Zuckerberg compared Llama to the open-source operating system Linux. When Linux took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many large tech companies invested in closed alternatives and criticized open-source software for being risky and unreliable. Today, however, Linux is widely used in cloud computing and serves as the core of the Android mobile operating system.
“I believe AI will develop in a similar way,” Zuckerberg writes in his letter. “Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed-source models, but open source is quickly closing the gap.”
Meta’s decision to give away its AI is not without self-interest, however. Llama’s previous releases have helped the company gain an influential position among AI researchers, developers, and startups. Liang also notes that Llama 3.1 is not truly open source because Meta imposes restrictions on its use, for example by limiting the scale at which the model can be used in commercial products.
The new version of Llama has 405 billion parameters or modifiable elements. Meta has already released two smaller versions of Llama 3, one with 70 billion parameters and another with 8 billion. Meta also released improved versions of these models today under the brand name Llama 3.1.
Llama 3.1 is too large to run on a regular computer, but Meta says that many cloud providers, including Databricks, Groq, AWS, and Google Cloud, will offer hosting options to allow developers to run custom versions of the model. The model can also be accessed on Meta.ai.
