Meta announced Tuesday that it is releasing a commercial version and the next generation of its open source artificial intelligence large language model Llama.
In a blog post, the tech giant introduced Llama 2, which is free for research and commercial use.
Llama 2 will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, Meta explained, with the companies "expanding their longstanding partnership."
Meta said it was including model weights and starting code for the retrained model, as well as conversational fine-tuned version.
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Developers using Microsoft Azure can build with it and leverage cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features.
Llama 2 is also available through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face and other providers.
"Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we're open sourcing Llama 2," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a separate Facebook post.
He noted that Llama 2 was pre-trained on 40% more data than Llama 1 and has improvements to its architecture.
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"For the fine-tuned models, we collected more than 1 million human annotations and applied supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) with leading results on safety and quality," Zuckerberg said.
Meta has said it believes an open approach is right for the development of today's AI models — and that it's safer, allowing for developers and researchers to "stress test" them.
"Our open source approach promotes transparency and access. We know that while AI has brought huge advances to society, it also comes with risk. We are committed to building responsibly and are providing a number of resources to help those who use Llama 2 do so too," it said.
Meta noted that its models have been red-teamed — tested for safety — through internal and external efforts, that it has created a responsible use guide and an acceptable use policy and that it explains evaluation methods for the model and identifies its shortcomings in a transparency schematic.
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The first Llama was already competitive with models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT — Microsoft has invested in OpenAI — and Google's Bard chatbot.
When questioned about why Microsoft would support an offering that might degrade OpenAI's value, a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters that giving developers a choice in the types of models they use would help extend its position as the go-to cloud platform for AI work.
Reuters contributed to this report.
