Llama 3.1: A First Look at Artificial Intelligence in Open-Source Models and AI for Consumers and Industrial Applications
Meta teased that it was working on an open-sourced model with the performance that matched the best private models, a first in the industry.
Meta says that the Llama 3.1 is as useful as the best commercial offerings from companies. Meta says the model is the smartest of all the AIs out there.
When I ask if Meta agrees with the growing consensus that the industry is running out of quality training data for models, Al-Dahle suggests there is a ceiling coming, though it may be farther out than some think. “We definitely think we have a few more [training] runs,” he says. It is difficult to say.
For the first time, Llama 3.1 contained looking for potential cyberattacks and biochemical use cases. Another reason to test the model more strenuously is what Meta is describing as emerging “agentic” behaviors.
For example, Al-Dahle tells me that Llama 3.1 is capable of integrating with a search engine API to “retrieve information from the internet based on a complex query and call multiple tools in succession in order to complete your tasks.” In another example, he asks the model to plot the number of homes sold in the United States over the last five years. It can retrieve the web search for you and produce a Python code to execute it.
Meta has an implementation of Llama that can be found in almost any part of the internet, it is a general-purpose chatbot. Starting this week, Llama 3.1 will be first accessible through WhatsApp and the Meta AI website in the US, followed by Instagram and Facebook in the coming weeks. It’s being updated to support new languages as well, including French, German, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish.
A new “Imagine Me” feature in Meta AI scans your face through your phone’s camera to then let you insert your likeness into images it generates. By capturing your likeness this way and not through the photos in your profile, Meta is hopefully avoiding the creation of a deepfake machine. If people want to create more kinds of Artificial Intelligence media and share it to their feeds, it’s ok if they blurred the line between what is discernibly real and not.
Meta AI is also coming to the Quest headset in the coming weeks, replacing its voice command interface. You will be able to use Meta Artificial Intelligence on the Quest to identify and learn about what you are looking at, like it was done in the Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
Meta has not shared any usage numbers for its assistant, despite the fact that it is predicted to be the most used chatbot by the end of the year. “I think the entire industry is still early on its path towards product market fit,” Al-Dahle says. Even with how overhyped AI can already feel, it’s clear that Meta and other players think the race is just beginning.
Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses. But Mark Zuckerberg is giving away what Meta considers to be one of the world’s best AI models for free.
In an open letter, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg compared llama to the open source Linux operating system. When Linux first began to take off, many big tech companies invested in closed alternatives and criticized the open source software as risky and unreliable. Today however Linux is widely used in cloud computing and serves as the core of the Android mobile OS.