Meta joins AI arms race with new language model LLaMA, but you can't talk to it (for now)

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has announced the release of a new large language model called LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI. While you cannot talk to it like ChatGPT or Bing AI chatbot (yet?), the model will be available to researchers and entities affiliated with the government, civil society, and academia under a non-commercial license for now.

“LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Friday.

Large language models are a type of artificial intelligence that can process and understand natural language text. These models have become increasingly popular in recent months, with companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google developing some of the largest and most powerful models in the world.

“We believe that the entire AI community — academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry — must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular. We look forward to seeing what the community can learn — and eventually build — using LLaMA,” the company wrote in a post.

The company also said that LLaMA has the potential to outperform its competitors. The company claims that LLaMA's 13 billion parameter version can even outperform GPT-3, a predecessor to the model on which ChatGPT is built. 

Furthermore, Meta describes its 65 billion parameters LLaMA model as competitive with Google's Chinchilla70B and PaLM-540B, which are even larger than the model used by Google to demonstrate its Bard chat-powered search.

A Meta spokeswoman attributed the performance to a larger quantity of "cleaner" data and "architectural improvements" in the model that enhanced training stability.

Meta in May last year released a large language model OPT-175B, also aimed at researchers, which formed the basis of a new iteration of its chatbot BlenderBot. It later introduced a model called Galactica, which could write scientific articles and solve math problems, but quickly pulled down the demo after it generated authoritative-sounding false responses.

(With Agency inputs)

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