Meta on Tuesday announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest version of its large language model that the company claims now rivals competitors from OpenAI and Anthropic. The new model comes just three months after Meta launched Llama 3 by integrating it into Meta AI, a chatbot that now lives in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and also powers the company’s smart glasses. In the interim, OpenAI and Anthropic already released new versions of their own AI models, a sign that Silicon Valley’s AI arms race isn’t slowing down any time soon.
Meta said that the new model, called Llama 3.1 405B, is the first openly available model that can compete against rivals in general knowledge, math skills and translating across multiple languages. The model was trained on more than 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, currently the fastest available chips that cost roughly $25,000 each, and can beat rivals on over 150 benchmarks, Meta claimed.
There are many, but one strategic goal is to “poison the well” for OpenAI.
OpenAI is trying to lobby for regulations that let them monopolize AI, so they are essentially the only ones that can sell it, and instead of playing this game Facebook is seeding public research so they can keep up with closed LLMs and make better cases for themselves. Which benefits them, as then they aren’t a customer of OpenAI or Google.
Another is to attract talent themselves. AI researchers love all this.
Yet another is to set the standard. The llama architecture is THE open LLM architecture because of facebook, and you run into major problems trying to run anything else, fast. Its also fostered a lot of innovations they wouldn’t have come up themselves, which they can turn around and deploy for free.
And they have a bit of a moat because hosting llama 400B is freaking expensive, and they have a ton of GPUs to do it with.
