Meta, Parent Company of Facebook, Unveils ChatGPT Competitor LLaMA

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has developed an artificial intelligence system that competes with renowned platforms such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. However, Meta is adopting a distinct strategy by making it available to users at no cost.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that the company is working with Microsoft to introduce a large language model for next-generation artificial intelligence and make the LLaMA 2 technology free for research and commercial use.

Like fellow tech giants Google and Microsoft, the social media company has long had a large team of computer science researchers dedicated to developing artificial intelligence technology. But that has been overshadowed by the launch of ChatGPT, which sparked a rush to take advantage of “generative AI” tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Meta has also tried to differentiate itself by being more open than some of its Big Tech rivals, offering peeks into the data and code it uses to build AI systems. It has argued that such transparency makes it easier for outside researchers to identify and mitigate the bias and toxicity that AI systems detect by imitating the writing and communication of real people.

“Open source promotes innovation because it allows many developers to build with new technology,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “It also improves security because when the software is open, more people can explore it to identify and fix potential problems. I think it would open up more progress if the ecosystem was more open, which is why we use Llama 2 openly.”

Zuckerberg pointed to Meta’s history of open source AI work, such as developing the widely used PyTorch machine learning framework.

Zuckerberg said people can download its new AI models directly or through a partnership that makes them available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform “along with Microsoft’s security and content tools.”

Financial terms of this partnership were not disclosed.

While Meta describes Microsoft as a “preferred” partner, Meta said the models are also available through Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s main cloud competitor, as well as artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face and others.

Microsoft is also a major financier and partner of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. ChatGPT or similar offerings from Microsoft or Google are not open source.

Microsoft and Meta also unveiled a new AI partnership at Microsoft’s annual business customer event on Tuesday. Microsoft said in a separate statement that the two companies are committed to democratizing AI and its benefits, and we’re excited that Meta is taking an open approach. Meta is already a customer of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.