Meta Set to Launch Commercial AI Model, Rivaling OpenAI and Google

Meta reportedly plans to release a commercial version of its AI model LLaMA soon, enabling companies to build custom software on this technology.

According to a report by the Financial Times on Thursday, Meta’s new commercial product will allow the U.S. tech giant to compete with its main rivals, ChatGPT developer OpenAI and Bard creator Google.

Meta first announced LLaMA in late February, describing it as a “state-of-the-art foundational large language model (LLM) designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI.”

Like other LLMs, LLaMA works by taking a sequence of words as input and predicts the next word to generate text from the 20 languages it currently supports recursively.

Meta released this model under a noncommercial license focused on research use cases, granting access on a case-by-case basis to academic researchers, civil society and academia, as well as industry research laboratories worldwide.

Meta confirmed its LLMs are open-source, meaning the details of the new model will be released publicly, unlike in the case of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

“The competitive landscape of AI is going to completely change in the coming months, in the coming weeks maybe, when there will be open-source platforms that are as good as the ones that are not,” Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun previously said.

However, this doesn’t mean its coming product will be completely free of charge. According to sources cited by the paper, Meta has been exploring charging businesses for the ability to customize the model to their needs by using their own proprietary data.

“At the end of the day, because you release something, you don’t completely give up on the intellectual property of that work... We haven’t been shy about the fact that we do want to be using these models in our products,” Meta’s AI Research VP Joelle Pineau told the paper.

Meta Invests Heavily in the R&D of AI

Meta has been a major player in AI development over the past decade, investing heavily in AI research and development and building several AI-powered products and services:

• Recommendation engines that suggest content to users that they are likely to be interested in
• AI-powered advertising tools to target ads to users based on their interests and demographics
• Online security systems supported by AI that detect and prevent harmful content, such as hate speech, bullying, and misinformation

Meta has also invested in developing new AI technologies, such as generative AI and natural language processing (NLP).

Generative AI, used to create new content, such as images, videos, and text, is being utilized by Meta to develop new products and services, such as virtual assistants and chatbots.

On the other hand, the tech giant uses NLP to enable computer systems to understand and process human language by developing new ways for users to interact with its platforms, including through voice commands and text-based interfaces.