Through a video on Instagram, with audio of questionable quality and without the polish that characterizes the productions of many creators, Mark Zuckerberg announced the release of Llama 3, the new version of the Artificial Intelligence platform developed by Meta, the company that manages Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram. This platform is the basis of Meta AI, a virtual assistant which in the future imagined and hoped for by Zuckerberg will accompany us in daily life through devices such as glasses and bracelets.
But while the final goal is still a little distant in time, the first step is already here: Meta AI has been included in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp. To get help on a particular topic or to delve deeper into a discussion, just use the bar where you are now searching and the AI assistant will respond as happens with ChatGPT. And for those who prefer a “more traditional” interaction, Meta has prepared the website www.meta.ai where, in addition to the presence of a bar for textual interactions, images can also be generated.
It all seems very “already seen”, given that ChatGPT has been offering these functions for some time, but Mark Zuckerberg underlined how Llama3 is the most advanced artificial intelligence system that can be used for free at the moment. Additionally, the interface is designed to deliver content in many modalities, ranging from text to images and videos. But there’s more.
An open choice
While other AI systems are mostly closed proprietary systems, Meta has decided to release Llama3’s 8 and 70 billion parameter models in open mode, making them available to anyone who wants to develop and experiment with artificial intelligence. It is not yet clear whether the 400 billion parameter version currently still in the training phase will also be released in open mode, but the first two versions already guarantee a very valid resource available to the general public because if it is true that more parameters means greater accuracy in the ability to imitate human reasoning and knowledge, it is also true that over time models are created that manage to be as effective as the larger ones, but saving billions of parameters and therefore these 8 and 70 are worth much more than in past.
Make way, therefore, for Llama 3 which in the coming weeks will be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM and Snowflake, guaranteeing hardware support from AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
A very varied array of services and companies that denote a truly all-round “Open” choice that was explained to us by Yann LeCun, Meta’s AI guru and one of the most influential people in its development: “In my opinion, the ‘AI is like the Internet. In its early days, Web servers were run by proprietary software like Microsoft’s Internet Information Services on machines running proprietary operating systems, but then along came Linux and the Open Source software that today runs the vast majority of the Web. We still believe that it will happen for generative AI and we want to do our part to ensure that everyone has access to world-class technology.”
And in Italy? We don’t know when we’ll see it
Unfortunately, all these announcements mainly concern the USA and a handful of other countries which currently include Australia, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. There is no release date yet for Europe and the only way to try the services is to use a VPN with exit in one of the countries already mentioned.
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2024-04-19 08:34:35