Meta Llama 2 AI Open-Source Language Model Available For Free: Generative AI To Compete With ChatGPT And Bard?

Meta will offer a commercial version of its open-source artificial intelligence model Llama. Until today, the powerful Large Language Model Generative AI backbone was available only to select academics for research purposes.

Llama and Llama 2 will be distributed by Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and other cloud service providers. Let's look at the latest development to see how the commercial AI landscape is changing.

Businesses To Get Free Access To Open-Source Llama and Llama 2 From Meta

Meta is about to disrupt the commercial aspects of Generative AI currently dominated by ChatGPT. The Facebook owner is giving start-ups and other businesses a powerful alternative to pricey and proprietary models offered by OpenAI and Google.

The new version of the AI language model, Llama 2, will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, free of charge.
Apart from Microsoft, the Generative AI backbone will also be made available via direct download and through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other providers.

The first edition of Llama was already competitive with LLM (Large Language Models) that power OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. The new Llama has been trained on 40 percent more data than its predecessor, with more than 1 million annotations by humans to fine-tune the quality of its outputs, Zuckerberg boasted.

Why Is Meta Offering An Expensive Product For Free To Businesses?

It is strange that Meta has offered its LLM Llama and Llama 2 for free. Moreover, the company's LLM is not even closed-source or proprietary. Simply put, Meta meticulously developed a product, no doubt at a high investment, and is now offering the same for free.

Meta has chosen to give away its LLM at a time when Amazon is marketing access to Claude, an AI LLM from the high-profile startup Anthropic, in addition to its own family of Titan models. Similarly, Google plans to make Claude and other models available to its cloud customers.

Back in April, Zuckerberg told investors that as a social media company, "Meta has more to gain by effectively crowd-sourcing ways to reduce infrastructure costs and maximize the creation of new consumer-facing tools that might draw people to its ad-supported services than it does by charging for access to its models".

In partnership with Meta, Microsoft has put in place an "acceptable use" policy for commercial Llama that prohibits "certain use cases". However, the product is essentially free to use and businesses can build their Generative AI platforms, tools, services, and chatbots using Meta's Llama and Llama 2.

By giving away its LLM, Meta could be hoping to benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and also the public's efforts to advance the platform. Just like Linux, Meta's LLM could be improved and bugs could be fixed for free. Additionally, businesses could make a beeline to use Meta's services.

Some reports suggest Meta could be trying to kill the competitors' products and services. If not, Meta could, at the least, erode all the possibilities of making money, thereby depriving its competitors of revenue. After all, why would developers use Amazon or Google's products if they could use equally powerful open-source systems from Meta for free?