Meta and Microsoft Introduce Llama 2 Language Model for AI

In a significant partnership, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella have announced the availability of Llama 2, the latest iteration of Meta’s open-source large language model.

Llama 2 is now accessible for both research and commercial purposes, bringing new possibilities to the AI community. Starting today, Meta is launching pretrained and fine-tuned models with varying parameters, including 7B, 13B, and 70B.

According to Meta, Llama 2 has been pretrained on 40% more data than its predecessor, Llama 1, and boasts architectural improvements.

In the fine-tuning process, over 1 million human annotations were collected, incorporating supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), resulting in leading safety and quality outcomes.

Access to the Llama 2 models is available through Meta’s website, as well as via platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Windows, Amazon Web Services, and Hugging Face. Additionally, an optimized version is also available for Windows systems.

Meta strongly advocates an open approach with broad accessibility for building AI models that reflect today’s capabilities, particularly in the generative space. The enduring partnership between Microsoft and Meta has proved beneficial for individuals and businesses.

Together, they have introduced an open ecosystem that allows interchangeability of AI frameworks. Additionally, the two companies have collaborated on research papers to advance the state-of-the-art in AI.

Recently, Microsoft and Meta joined a group of supporters endorsing the Partnership on AI’s framework for collective action in the creation and sharing of synthetic media.

“Llama Impact Challenge: We want to activate the community of innovators who aspire to use Llama to solve hard problems. We are launching a challenge to encourage a diverse set of public, non-profit, and for-profit entities to use Llama 2 to address environmental, education and other important challenges.”

The Llama Impact Challenge rules will be available prior to the start of it.