28 July 2023

AI large language model, Llama 2.

 

Why Meta is giving away its extremely powerful AI model

The AI debate splitting the tech world, explained.

Large crowd of people look into darkness in front of them. A mysterious door is cracked open, revealing glowing red light.Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
"Last week, Meta made a game-changing move in the world of AI.
  • At a time when other leading AI companies like Google and OpenAI are closely guarding their secret sauce, Meta decided to give away, for free, the code that powers its innovative new AI large language model, Llama 2. 
  • That means other companies can now use Meta’s Llama 2 model, which some technologists say is comparable to ChatGPT in its capabilities, to build their own customized chatbots.
Llama 2 could challenge the dominance of ChatGPT, which broke records for being one of the fastest-growing apps of all time. But more importantly, its open source nature adds new urgency to an important ethical debate over who should control AI — and whether it can be made safe.
As AI becomes more advanced and potentially more dangerous, is it better for society if the code is under wraps — limited to the staff of a small number of companies — or should it be shared with the public so that a wider group of people can have a hand in shaping the transformative technology?

Top tech companies are taking different approaches

In Meta’s Llama 2 announcement, Mark Zuckerberg posted an Instagram of himself smiling with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, announcing the two companies’ partnership on the release. Zuckerberg also made the case for why it’s better for leading AI models to be “open source,” which means making the technology’s underlying code largely available for anyone to use.
“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” wrote Zuckerberg wrote in a separate Facebook post. “It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues.”
The move is being welcomed by many AI developers, researchers, and academics who say this will give them unprecedented access to build new tools or study systems that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to create. Cutting-edge large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT can cost tens of millions of dollars to create and maintain.
“I’m just bracing myself for what kind of progress can happen,” said Nazneen Rajani, research lead at open source AI platform Hugging Face, which collaborated with Meta on the release. Rajani wrote a post on Twitter assessing Llama 2’s capabilities when it first came out and told Vox, “We will be able to uncover more secret ingredients about what it actually takes to build a model like GPT-4.”
But open-sourcing AI comes with major risks. . ."

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