Meta heats up Big Tech’s AI arms race with new language model

Meta Platforms Inc said on Friday it was releasing to researchers a new large language model, the core software of a new artificial intelligence system, heating up an AI arms race as Big Tech companies rush to integrate the technology into their products and impress investors.

The public battle to dominate the AI technology space kicked off late last year with the launch of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and prompted tech heavyweights from Alphabet Inc to China’s Baidu Inc, to trumpet their own offerings.

Meta’s LLaMA, short for Large Language Model Meta AI, will be available under non-commercial licence to researchers and entities affiliated with government, civil society, and academia, it said in a blog.

Large language models mine vast amounts of text in order to summarize information and generate content. They can answer questions, for instance, with sentences that can read as though written by humans.

The model, which Meta said requires “far less” computing power than previous offerings, is trained on 20 languages with a focus on those with Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

“Meta’s announcement today appears to be a step in testing their generative AI capabilities so they can implement them into their products in the future,” said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson. “Generative AI is a new application of AI that Meta has less experience with, but is clearly important for the future of their business.”

It later introduced a model called Galactica, which could write scientific articles and solve math problems, but quickly pulled down the demo after it generated authoritative-sounding false responses.