With LLaMA V2, Meta may be trying to benefit from the open-source community, similar to what Google has done with Android.
The Financial Times, citing three sources familiar with the project, reports that Meta wants to launch a commercial AI model to compete with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model is said to generate language, code, and images.
It may be a new variant of Meta’s LLaMA, a large language model used in numerous open-source projects. LLaMA v1 has only been released under a research license and therefore may not be used directly for commercial purposes. However, replicas exist.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already announced that a new AI model is in the works, which could be LLaMA v2 or under a different name. Meta wants to use the model for its services and offer it to external interested parties, according to Zuckerberg. Special attention is safety.
I think Meta has profited greatly from LLaMa being openly available to the FOSS LLM community. Recently I saw a post on r/LocalLLaMa that went like “Meta published a new paper, I immediately noticed a way to make it a lot better”.
If they release a LLaMa V2 and don’t fuck it up by lobotomizing it, we could very soon see open source models overtake GPT3.5 and I’m excited about that.
Between this and treads having activity pub integration, it is infinitely upsetting to me that the only company that seems to be interested in open tech is fucking meta…