Meta Releases Advanced Llama 2 Large Language Model to Power New AI Experiences

It’s fascinating to see how Microsoft is re-angling itself as a pacesetter within the new generative AI push.

As we speak, Meta has launched its newest Llama 2 large language model (LLM), which, in testing, has outperformed different open-source chat fashions (together with GPT) on ‘most benchmarks’, together with helpfulness and security.

Llama 2 will likely be made commercially accessible, freed from cost, offering a substitute for the present LLMs accessible through Google and OpenAI, and probably positioning Meta as a pacesetter within the rising AI growth area.

As a part of the brand new launch, Meta’s sharing three totally different variations of the mannequin – one educated on 7 billion parameters, one on 13b, and eventually, a 70b model, whereas it’s additionally releasing ‘Llama 2 Chat’, a extra fine-tuned variation that’s constructed particularly for conversational use circumstances.

In itself, this can be a technical feat, however much more fascinating, Meta and Microsoft have additionally announced an growth of their partnership, which can allow builders utilizing Microsoft instruments to decide on between Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s GPT fashions when constructing their AI experiences.

As per Microsoft:

“Today, at Microsoft Inspire, Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family of large language models (LLMs) on Azure and Windows. Llama 2 is designed to enable developers and organizations to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences. Meta and Microsoft share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits and we are excited that Meta is taking an open approach with Llama 2.”

Microsoft has additionally invested $10 billion into OpenAI, and has already constructed GPT into most of its tools and platforms. And now, it’ll even be plugging Llama 2 into numerous purposes, which can see Microsoft turn into a key platform in facilitating connection between shoppers and these main LLMs.

A key focus of Meta’s Llama 2 mannequin is security, and making certain that the outcomes produced by the system are correct and restrict misuse. Which could possibly be a major step, contemplating the assorted points which were reported with some early LLMs, together with GPT, which has usually led customers astray on account of ‘hallucinations’ and sharing of misinformation and/or dangerous views.

As a way to mitigate this, Meta has added vital coaching load round numerous components, together with ‘truthfulness’, ‘toxicity’, and’ bias’. Primarily based on this extra work, Meta says that Llama 2 Chat ‘reveals nice enchancment over the pretrained Llama 2 by way of truthfulness and toxicity’.

“The percentage of toxic generations shrinks to effectively 0% for Llama 2-Chat of all sizes: this is the lowest toxicity level among all compared models. In general, when compared to Falcon and MPT, the fine-tuned Llama 2-Chat shows the best performance in terms of toxicity and truthfulness.”

That might make this an much more helpful generative AI device, which could possibly be extra relied upon for a broader vary of duties. As a result of whereas GPT is superb in its capability to supply human-like textual content generations, there are additionally vital dangers in utilizing these outputs with out checking and re-checking any and all references and language, so as to be sure that it’s not being negatively influenced by its numerous inputs.

If an LLM could possibly be extra trusted on this respect, that might considerably broaden its use case, which Llama 2 is theoretically extra outfitted to handle.

It’s an fascinating new consideration both method, and the mixing with Microsoft will see Meta’s new LLM play an even bigger position in broader AI growth, and will see Meta’s system ultimately turn into a key chief within the area.

Microsoft Azure AI prospects will be capable of take a look at Llama 2 with their very own pattern knowledge, so as to take a look at its efficiency in several contexts.

You may learn extra in regards to the Llama 2 course of and dataset here.