Meta Opens AI LLM for Commercial Use via Microsoft

Meta Platforms is making its artificial intelligence large language model, Llama 2, available for commercial use through partnerships with major cloud providers including Microsoft. Bloomberg: Meta isn't charging for access or usage of the model it developed, the company said. Instead, by opening up the technology to other companies, Meta says it will benefit from improvements that can be made when more developers use, stress test and identify problems with it. Making the large language model, or LLM, more widely accessible, also establishes Meta alongside other tech giants as having a key contribution to the AI arms race. Meta is spending record amounts on AI infrastructure, and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said incorporating AI improvements into all the company's products and algorithms is a priority. Meta took on the cost of training the models. Cloud providers including Microsoft, Amazon and Hugging Face are hosting the tools and providing the computing power to run them. The commercial rollout of Llama 2 is the first project to debut out of the company's generative AI group, a new team assembled in February. To prepare the new model for release, Meta employees and third-parties ran safety tests called "red-teaming exercises." It's a separate model from the one Meta uses for its own products.

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