Meta Says Tech and Banking Giants Use Its AI

Meta says its AI models have been downloaded nearly 350 million times since last year.

That’s more than 10 times the downloads compared to this time in 2023, the social media giant said Thursday (Aug. 29), with more than 20 million downloads in the last month.

“The success of Llama is made possible through the power of open source. By making our Llama models openly available we’ve seen a vibrant and diverse AI ecosystem come to life where developers have more choice and capability than ever before,” the company said in a post on its website.

“The innovation has been broad and rapid, from startups pushing new boundaries to enterprises of all sizes using Llama to build on-premises or through a cloud service provider.”

Meta added that usage through cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon Web Service have more than doubled between May and July. Companies using Llama include Goldman Sachs, Zoom, AT&T, DoorDash and Shopify.

PYMNTS explored the business impact of Meta’s Llama 3.1 last month, noting that businesses are weighing the implications of access to powerful, cost-free AI against the difficulties related to implementation and security.

“These models can be used to communicate with customers and provide instant 24/7 assistance with simple queries that do not require human intervention,” Ilia Badeev, head of data science at Trevolution Group, told PYMNTS. “With LLMs [large language models], marketing campaigns and recommendations can be truly personalized for individual customers.”

And some experts forecast a fundamental change in customer service, like Mike Conover, CEO of the AI company Brightwave.

“If you think about the cost of intelligence effectively going to zero over time for customer relations, call centers will not exist in the future,” he said. “AI systems will manage huge volumes of customer inbound in a meaningful and satisfactory way to the end user.”

Days later, during an earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the company’s plans to use AI as a moneymaker. For example, he predicted that AI would eventually generate personalized ads, letting advertisers simply specify business objectives and budgets, with Meta’s AI handling the rest.

“Advertisers will basically just be able to tell us a business objective and a budget, and we’re going to go do the rest for them,” he said. “We’re going to get there incrementally over time, but I think this is going to be a very big deal.”

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