Meta and Microsoft release free-to-use AI system Llama 2

Meta's Llama will be released free for research and commercial use. It will be available on Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure and its operating system Windows among others.

Entering the AI race, Meta, in collaboration with Microsoft, has launched a large language AI model called Llama 2. The AI uses an open source version and is free for public use.

The large language model (LLM) can also be used to create a Chat-GPT like chatbot. It is available for commercial use, for established businesses, startups, and lone operators, as well as research purposes.

You get a Llama! And you!
Meta is releasing Llama 2, the next generation of Llama. With Llama 2 now commercially available, anyone can leverage the large language model to build their own applications. https://t.co/wCTEp4qE81 pic.twitter.com/MBen3FHjzZ

— Tech at Meta (@techatfacebook) July 18, 2023

"LLaMA is designed to be versatile and can be applied to many different use cases, versus a fine-tuned model that is designed for a specific task. By sharing the code for LLaMA, other researchers can more easily test new approaches to limiting or eliminating these problems in large language models," Meta said in a blogpost.

Microsoft announced that the LLM will be available on its cloud computing platform Azure and its operating system Windows. Meta has announced that the LLM will also be available on other providers like AWS, Hugging face, among others.

"We offer developers choice in the types of models they build on, supporting open and frontier models and are thrilled to be Meta’s preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time," the company said in a blog post.

At the Microsoft Inspire event, the company shared that the AI tools will be built into its platforms. The company shared more details about the AI tools built into its 360 platform. Qualcomm has also announced that it is working with Meta to bring LLaMa to laptops, phones, and headsets starting next years.

Meta has said that the AI LLM has been pretrained on publicly available online data sources Llama-2-chat, leverages publicly available instruction datasets and over 1 million human annotations, it said.

In a Facebook post Zuckerberg said, "Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open."