Daily Times

Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, has created Llama 2, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that competes with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, but with a unique twist: it will be available for free.

Meta’s move enables startups and businesses to compete at a lower cost with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Llama 2 will be distributed by Microsoft via its Azure cloud service, with Meta referring to Microsoft as its “preferred partner” for the release.

Llama 2 is part of Meta’s large language model (LLM) series, which serves as the foundation for generative AI products such as ChatGPT.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced that the technology would be available for both research and commercial use, highlighting the company’s commitment to openness and innovation.

Meta has sought to distinguish itself from other tech behemoths by being more open about the data and code it uses to develop AI systems. Open-source models, according to Zuckerberg, foster innovation while also improving safety and security. In accordance with this philosophy, Meta has open-sourced Llama 2 and emphasized its history of open-sourcing AI work, including the widely used machine-learning framework PyTorch.

However, unlike Meta’s previous work, the research paper introducing Llama 2 is less transparent, omitting details about the specific data used for training. The model was trained using publicly available data, but not Meta’s own products or services. Notably, data from websites that contained sensitive personal information were removed.

Meta will make its AI models available for download directly from the company’s website or through Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

The partnership’s financial terms were not disclosed, but Meta confirmed that the models would also be available through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other platforms. While Microsoft is a “preferred” partner, it is important to note that Microsoft is also a major funder and partner of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

In addition to the Llama 2 announcement, Microsoft revealed at its Inspire event that it would charge businesses a monthly fee of $30 per user for its generative AI tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot.