Meta Unveils Llama 3.1, Challenging Closed-Source AI Giants

Meta has challenged the artificial intelligence status quo by releasing Llama 3.1, unveiling a 405 billion parameter open-source model that aims to rival closed-source AI leaders.

In a Tuesday (July 23) news release, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized the company’s commitment to open-source AI, saying, “The new Llama 3.1 models are a super-important step for open-source AI. With NVIDIA AI Foundry, companies can easily create and customize the state-of-the-art AI services people want and deploy them with NVIDIA NIM.”

Richard Gardner, CEO of Modulus, previously told PYMNTS that open-source AI models like Llama could increase competition and potentially reduce costs for businesses, with the focus shifting to the quality of training data and expertise in applying these models.

Large-Scale Model

Meta claims that Llama 3.1 405B is the world’s largest and most capable openly available foundation model. The company says it rivals top AI models in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use and multilingual translation.

Nvidia is leveraging Meta’s open-source approach by integrating Llama 3.1 into its new AI Foundry service. “Llama 3.1 opens the floodgates for every enterprise and industry to build state-of-the-art generative AI applications. NVIDIA AI Foundry has integrated Llama 3.1 throughout and is ready to help enterprises build and deploy custom Llama supermodels,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a Tuesday news release.

Meta is expanding the Llama ecosystem with new tools and partnerships. The company is releasing a reference system that includes sample applications and new components such as Llama Guard 3, a multilingual safety model, and Prompt Guard, a prompt injection filter.

Llama 3.1 is poised to reshape commerce across the board. By making advanced AI accessible to businesses of all sizes, it levels the playing field in a way that could spark widespread innovation. Small retailers can now harness the same caliber of AI as major corporations for tasks like customer service and inventory management. Financial firms might deploy more nuanced risk assessment tools, while manufacturers could fine-tune their supply chains with unprecedented precision. This democratization of AI technology opens doors for personalized marketing, streamlined operations, and AI-driven product development that was once the domain of tech giants alone.

The release of Llama 3.1 could reshape the AI landscape by providing open access to frontier-level AI capabilities. Jeremy Barnes, VP of AI Product at ServiceNow, noted in a Tuesday Nvidia blog post, “Organizations deploying AI can gain a competitive edge with custom models that incorporate industry and business knowledge.”

Meta is also proposing the “Llama Stack,” a set of standardized interfaces for building AI components and applications, aiming to foster easier interoperability across the AI ecosystem.

An Open-Source Future?

Zuckerberg argued in an open letter that open-source AI is the future, drawing parallels to the evolution of operating systems: “Today, Linux is the industry standard foundation for both cloud computing and the operating systems that run most mobile devices — and we all benefit from superior products because of it.”

He believes open-source AI offers several advantages for developers and organizations, including the ability to “train, fine-tune, and distill our own models” and “control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor.” Zuckerberg also said Llama 3.1 is cost-effective, saying developers can run inference “at roughly 50% the cost of using closed models like GPT-4o.”

Addressing concerns about giving away technological advantages, Zuckerberg argues that “open sourcing any given model isn’t giving away a massive advantage over the next best models at that point in time.” He said Meta’s business model isn’t based on selling access to AI models, unlike closed providers.

On AI safety, Zuckerberg believes “open source AI will be safer than the alternatives” due to increased transparency and scrutiny. He asserts that widespread deployment of AI is crucial for security: “I think it will be better to live in a world where AI is widely deployed so that larger actors can check the power of smaller bad actors.”

Zuckerberg concludes by calling the Llama 3.1 release “an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source,” and invites developers to join Meta in “this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world.”

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