Meta’s quest to dominate the AI race seems to be on schedule, with the company reporting today that its open source “Llama” large language models (LLM) have now been downloaded a billion times.
Seems fitting to celebrate the moment with an AI-generated image. I mean, absolutely do not zoom in on the faces of the people lining the street on which the llamas here roam, but other than that…
As noted, a growing number of AI projects are now using Meta’s Llama models to power their processes. That may not necessarily benefit Meta directly, in that these projects work independently of the company, but by playing a part in more AI projects, Meta is also embedding it’s systems at the foundational level of a broad range of initiatives.
As per Meta:
“Since we first launched Llama in 2023, enterprises, startups, non-profits, creators, scientists, public institutions and more have used our models and tools to explore the incredible capabilities of AI. From top tech companies to universities, people and organizations all over the world are using Llama to innovate, drive scientific advances, and unlock new economic opportunities. And what we’ve consistently heard from developers is that the transparency, customizability and security of open source models like Llama help reach new levels of creativity and innovation.”
This is all part of Meta’s open source approach to AI development, which it sees as the best path forward for broad-reaching AI development. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, open sourcing AI development will enable greater access to the benefits of AI tools, while it’ll also ensure that Meta is intrinsically linked to a wider set of AI projects, making it a more critical partner in the evolution of such systems.
Zuckerberg has also criticized Apple’s approach to its app ecosystem, and the controls it implements over app development, and he sees this open source approach as being a counter to Apple’s restrictive approach.
Not sure how true that is, but basically, Zuckerberg really doesn’t like Apple, and he noted that in his initial open source AI manifesto.
Though the real motivation, as noted, is to establish Meta as the key AI leader. And with the company also investing more than $65 billion into AI development this year, and gathering up more computing resources than its competitors, it is indeed on track to become the dominant player in the space.
Open sourcing its models will only add to this, embedding Meta’s informational datasets as the frameworks of many more AI developments.
Indeed, Meta has also shared an overview of some of the ways in which its Llama model is already being used in different projects:
- Spotify has used Llama to help deliver customized, contextualized recommendations for new songs, artists, podcasts or audiobooks
- Fynopsis uses Llama to provide multilingual and vision capabilities to analyze user data and auto-fill government documents
- An innovative AI project has used Llama to power landmark assessment, and deliver insights about their historical or cultural significance.
At the same time, Meta’s Llama models are also subject to legal challenges from various artists and publishers, who claim that Meta used their copyright-protected material without permission.
If any of these cases are upheld, that could add to Meta’s AI development costs, in a significant way, though Meta is also working with the Trump Administration to ensure greater protections for such use, which could negate these legal claims in favor of innovation.
And with so many extended projects also now reliant on Llama models, that could also strengthen its case, in pushing for such lawsuits to be dropped in favor of these developments.
On balance, right now, I would say that Meta is indeed leading the AI race, with broader adoption of its models, and more compute power, helping to boost its status.
More adoption of its core models can only help, while also making it increasingly difficult to reel back all that Llama data, if that were to be required based on legal challenges.
Source link
