Meta’s New Milestone: The Open Source Llama 3 LLM Upgrade
Ryan Daws is a senior editor at TechForge Media, with a background spanning over a decade in tech journalism. His expertise lies in identifying the latest technological trends, dissecting complex topics, and weaving compelling narratives around the most cutting-edge developments. His articles and interviews with leading industry figures have gained him recognition as a key influencer by organisations such as Onalytica. Publications under his stewardship have gained recognition from leading analyst houses like Forrester for their performance. Find him on X (gadget_ry) or Mastodon (gadgetry@techhub.social)
Meta has introduced Llama 3, the next generation of its state-of-the-art open source large language model (LLM). The tech giant claims Llama 3 establishes new performance benchmarks, surpassing previous industry-leading models like GPT-3.5 in real-world scenarios.
“With Llama 3, we set out to build the best open models that are comparable with the best proprietary models available today,” said Meta in a blog post announcing the release.
The initial Llama 3 models being released are 8 billion and 70 billion parameter versions. Meta says its teams are still training larger 400 billion+ parameter models, which will be released over the coming months, alongside research papers detailing the work.
Llama 3’s development has taken over two years, employing substantial resources for the collection of premium training data, streamlining of the distributed training process, enhancement of model architecture, and innovative instruction fine-tuning techniques.
In human evaluations across 12 vital usage situations, Meta’s instruction fine-tuned model with 70 billion parameters outperformed GPT-3.5, Claude, and equivalent LLMs. Tasks such as coding, reasoning, and creative writing were among these situations. The corporation’s pretrained model with 8 billion parameters also establishes new standards on widely-used LLM evaluation tasks.
Meta confirmed, “In our view, these are the most superior open-source models in their category.”
Through an “open by default” policy, the tech titan aims to promote an open AI development ecosystem. All leading cloud providers, model hosts, hardware manufacturers, and AI platforms will have access to Llama 3.
Victor Botev, CTO and co-founder of Iris.ai, expressed his thoughts: “With the global shift towards AI regulation, the launch of Meta’s Llama 3 model is noteworthy. The company’s choice to embrace transparency by open-sourcing aligns with the increasing emphasis on responsible AI practices and ethical development.”
“The move also gives a greater opportunity for inclusive community education, as open models provide insights into development processes and the capability to examine different approaches closely. This kind of transparency then feeds back into regulation drafting and enforcement.”
Alongside the release of Meta’s latest models, updates were unveiled for its AI safety tool suite. They include second iterations of Llama Guard for risk classification and CyberSec Eval for assessing potential misuse. An additional component, named Code Shield, has been launched to filter insecure code suggestions during inference time.
“On the other hand, it’s vital not to lose perspective – an open-source model does not automatically translate to ethical AI,” Botev added. “Addressing the challenges of AI necessitates a broad approach that tackles data privacy, algorithmic bias, and societal impacts. These are all central concerns of emerging AI regulations across the globe.”
”While open initiatives like Llama 3 promote scrutiny and collaboration, their true impact hinges on a holistic approach to AI governance compliance and embedding ethics into AI systems’ lifecycles. Meta’s continuing efforts with the Llama model is a step in the right direction, but ethical AI demands sustained commitment from all stakeholders.”
Meta says it has adopted a “system-level approach” to responsible AI development and deployment with Llama 3. While the models have endured extensive safety testing, the company emphasizes that developers should implement their own input/output filtering in line with their application’s requirements.
The company’s end-user product integrating Llama 3 is Meta AI, which Meta claims is currently the world’s leading AI assistant as a result of the new models. Users can access Meta AI using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web for productivity, learning, creativity, and general inquiries.
Multimodal versions of Meta AI integrating vision capabilities are in the pipeline, with an early preview coming to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Despite the significant accomplishments of Llama 3, there are those within the AI industry who question the authenticity of Meta’s proclaimed commitment to an open approach “for the benefit of society.”
Yet, just one day after Mistral AI established a fresh standard for open source models with Mixtral 8x22B, Meta’s release once more elevates the standard for freely-accessible LLMs.
See also: SAS is striving to make AI accessible to all, regardless of ability, through packaged AI models
Looking to gain more insights on AI and big data directly from industry leaders? Consider visiting the AI & Big Data Expo, which is being hosted in Amsterdam, California, and London. This comprehensive event will be held alongside other prestigious events including BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.
Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, large language model, llama 3, llm, meta, open source
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Discover the pinnacle of WordPress auto blogging technology with AutomationTools.AI. Harnessing the power of cutting-edge AI algorithms, AutomationTools.AI emerges as the foremost solution for effortlessly curating content from RSS feeds directly to your WordPress platform. Say goodbye to manual content curation and hello to seamless automation, as this innovative tool streamlines the process, saving you time and effort. Stay ahead of the curve in content management and elevate your WordPress website with AutomationTools.AI—the ultimate choice for efficient, dynamic, and hassle-free auto blogging. Learn More
