(San Francisco) Meta on Tuesday made its Llama 2 language model “open source” (free access to programming code) free to businesses and researchers, a strategic move that puts the social media giant back in the race to become a leader. generative artificial intelligence.
Llama 2, a competitor of GPT-4 – at work in ChatGPT and Bing, Microsoft’s search engine – will be available in particular via the main cloud platforms (remote computing), Azure (Microsoft) and AWS (Amazon ).
“By making artificial intelligence (AI) models widely available, they can benefit everyone…and we believe it’s safer,” Meta said in a statement.
The launch of ChatGPT late last year by OpenAI and its immediate success launched a frantic race for generative AI, capable of answering questions in everyday language and generating all kinds of text.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s main investor, and Google dominate this sector, but most tech giants are also massively committed to the latest generation of AI, despite controversies around the mistakes it makes and the potential dangers.
“Giving corporations, start-ups, entrepreneurs, and researchers access to tools they would struggle to build on their own at this scale, with computing capabilities they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, will opening up a world of opportunities for them to experiment and innovate,” says Meta.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company made the announcement at a marketing event for Microsoft, its “primary partner for Llama 2”.
The Windows firm thus also takes a position on the side of open source AI, the operation of which is deemed to be less opaque, more transparent than that of other AIs.
The American group also revealed that Copilot, its new flagship tool for its Microsoft 365 office suite, which puts the spotlight on AI, will cost $30 per month per user.
Copilot “puts thousands of skills to work for you,” the company promises. This virtual assistant transcribes meetings, offers summaries and above all has access to emails, calendar, contacts and documents to write texts and perform tasks on request.
“We believe that within three years, more than 50% of Microsoft’s user base will be using game-changing enterprise AI,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
The cloud AI market, according to Dan Ives, could increase annual cloud computing revenue by 20% by 2025.