Meta's Llama 2 Open-Source AI Chatbot: a New Frontier for Generative AI

Monday - September 11 2023, 16:10 UTC - 1 year ago

This summer, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta unveiled its Llama 2 chatbot. It is open source, allowing users to research and modify this AI. The strategy has sparked a great deal of discussion and reshaped the current landscape for generative AI. Through open-sourcing, Meta hopes for safer AI while OpenAI remains more guarded. Users are limited commercially, but if they gain more than 700 million active users, they must request a license from Meta.

This summer, the AI division of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta unveiled its Llama 2 chatbot. Microsoft has been appointed as Meta’s preferred partner on Llama 2, which will be available through the Windows operating system.

Meta’s approach with Llama 2 contrasts with that of the company OpenAI, which created the AI chatbot ChatGPT. That’s because Meta has made its product open source—meaning that the original code is freely available, allowing it to be researched and modified.

This strategy has sparked a vast wave of discussions. Will it foster greater public scrutiny and regulation of large language models (LLMs)—the technology that underlies AI chatbots such as Llama 2 and ChatGPT? Could it inadvertently empower criminals to use the technology to help them carry out phishing attacks or develop malware? And could the move help Meta gain an advantage over OpenAI and Google in this fast-moving field? .

Whatever happens, this strategic move looks set to reshape the current landscape of generative AI. In February 2023, Meta released its first version of the LLM, called Llama, but made it available for academic use only. Its updated version, Llama 2, features improved performance and is more suitable for business use.

Like other AI chatbots, Llama 2 had to be trained using online data. Exposure to this vast resource of information helps it improve what it does—providing users with useful responses to their questions.

An initial version of Llama 2 was created through "supervised fine-tuning," a technique that uses high-quality question-and-answer data to calibrate it for use by the public. It was further refined with human feedback reinforcement learning which, as the name suggests, incorporates people’s assessments of the AI’s performance to align it with human preferences.

Guaranteed Benefits .

Meta’s embrace of the open-source ethos with Llama 2 allows it to capitalize on what appears to be an approach that has worked for the company in the past. Meta’s engineers are known for their development of products to aid developers such as React and PyTorch. Both are open source and have become the industry standard. Through them, Meta has set a precedent of innovation through collaboration.

The release of Llama 2 holds the promise of safer generative AI. Through shared wisdom and collective exploration, users can identify erroneous information and any vulnerabilities that could be exploited by criminals. Unexpected applications have already emerged, such as a version of Llama 2 that can be installed on iPhones and was created by users, underscoring the potential for creativity within this community.

But there are limits to how far Meta will allow Llama 2 users to commercialize its AI system. If any party achieves more than 700 million active users in the preceding calendar month for a product based on Llama 2, it will have to request a license from Meta. For Meta, this opens up the potential for profit-sharing on successful products based on Llama 2.

Meta’s strategy contrasts starkly with the more guarded approach of its primary competitor, OpenAI. Even as some question Meta’s ability to compete in this area without the significant resources of Google or OpenAI, others feel that this risk is outweighed by the potential benefits.