Move over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Prometheus — there’s yet another large language model-powered artificial intelligence in town. Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, introduced its own AI today, called LLaMA.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg described his company’s contribution to the buzzy AI technology sphere in, what else, but a Facebook post.
“Today we’re releasing a new state-of-the-art AI large language model called LLaMA designed to help researchers advance their work,” Zuckerberg wrote on his social media platform. He added that “LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving maths theorems or predicting protein structures.” But the Meta exec did not explain exactly which (if any) of those tasks LLaMA could currently accomplish.
In fact, the only detail that Zuckerberg offered on the large language model in the Friday announcement is that his company is “committed to this open model of research and we’ll make our new model available to the AI research community.”
Gizmodo reached out to Meta with questions about LLaMA’s capacity, integration into the company’s products, and if/when/how the AI will be made publicly available, but did not immediately receive a response.
A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg that the large language model has not yet been put to use in any of the company’s platforms (including Instagram and Facebook) at this time.
Without more information, it’s impossible to say how LLaMA will stack up against other tech giants’ AI attempts in a rapidly crowding field. However, just about every recent chatbot launch so far has come with its own share of snafus. Google and Microsoft both integrated AI-text generators into their search platforms, and both ended up unwittingly advertising inaccurate information. Then, there’s the unresolved questions of copyright, privacy, whether or not AI can develop “feelings,” and how to manage the workarounds many on the internet are finding to bypass restrictions and generate offensive content or even malware.
But maybe Meta’s commitment to open research could help resolve some of the ongoing issues. Or maybe, it’ll just be another blip in the AI boom.