Meta to make new version of AI model available free of charge on Microsoft

Move gives start-ups and other businesses a low-cost opportunity to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is making a commercial version of its artificial intelligence model freely available, in a move that gives startups and other businesses a low-cost opportunity compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

A new version of a Meta large language model (LLM), called Llama 2, will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, Meta said in a blogpost, referring to Microsoft as our preferred partner" for the release. LLMs underpin generative AI products like the ChatGPT chatbot, although ChatGPT's owner has not open-sourced - or made widely available to others - its LLM, called GPT-4.