“Announcement: Meta’s Highly Anticipated Llama 3 LLM Will Soon Be Available as an Open-Source Release”

“Our goal over time is to make a Llama-powered Meta AI be the most useful assistant in the world,” said Joelle Pineau, Vice President AI Research. Most notably, Meta’s Llama families, built as open-source products, represent a different philosophical approach to how AI should develop as a wider technology. But Meta is also playing it more cautiously, it seems, especially when it comes to other generative AI beyond text generation. Ironically — or perhaps predictably (heh) — even as Meta works to launch Llama 3, it does have some significant generative AI skeptics in the house. It’s not generative AI,” he said.

During an event in the bustling city of London on Tuesday, massive corporation Meta excitedly confirmed their plans for the upcoming release of Llama 3, the latest iteration of their powerful language model utilized for generative AI assistants. In fact, The Information previously reported on Monday that Meta was gearing up for the launch.

“Within the next month, actually less, hopefully in a very short period of time, we hope to start rolling out our new suite of next-generation foundation models, Llama 3,” said Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs at Meta.

According to Clegg, a variety of versions of the product will be rolled out during the year, each with their own unique capabilities and versatility. The Meta Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, revealed that these models will be utilized across multiple Meta products.

The release of Llama 3 comes as Meta scrambles to catch up to OpenAI, who took the tech industry by storm more than a year ago with the launch of their ChatGPT app, making generative AI more popular and mainstream than ever before.

Meta, known for their generally cautious approach with AI, faced backlash from the public for the limited capabilities of previous Llama versions. While Llama 2 was released publicly in July 2023, the first version leaked online and was not officially released to the public.

With Llama 3 being their most ambitious yet, Meta hopes to address and surpass these limitations. Not only will it accurately answer questions, but it will also be able to handle a wider range of topics, including those that may be more controversial. By doing so, they aim to captivate users and make Llama the most useful assistant in the world.

“Our goal over time is to make a Llama-powered Meta AI be the most useful assistant in the world,” stated Joelle Pineau, Meta’s Vice President of AI Research. “There’s quite a bit of work remaining to get there.”

Despite their promises, Meta did not disclose the size of Llama 3’s parameters or provide any demonstrations on how it will function. However, it is expected to have approximately 140 billion parameters, double the amount of the largest Llama 2 model.

Interestingly, Meta’s approach to developing Llama, as an open-source product, differs from other companies who prefer to keep their AI models proprietary. By doing so, Meta hopes to appeal to developers and gain their support.

However, the corporation is taking a more cautious approach when it comes to other forms of generative AI, such as image generation. According to Pineau, Meta will not be releasing Emu, their image generation tool, just yet.

“Latency matters a lot along with safety along with ease of use, to generate images that you’re proud of and that represent whatever your creative context is,” explained Cox.

Ironically, even as Meta prepares for the launch of Llama 3, they still have a prominent member of the company who remains skeptical about generative AI. Yann LeCun, the renowned AI academic and Meta’s chief AI scientist, takes a different stance and believes that joint embedding predicting architecture (JEPA) is the future of AI.