The new llama 3.1 is free, powerful, and risky
Llama 3.1: Coming to Open Source AI and AI Assisting Artificial Intelligence for Generative User Behaviors
An associate professor at a university who tracks open source artificial intelligence says it is very exciting. If developers find the new model to be just as capable as the industry’s leading ones, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Liang says, it could see many move over to Meta’s offering. “It will be interesting to see how the usage shifts,” he says.
The assistant will switch you to the scaled-back 70 billion model if you do not perform well in a given week. This suggests the 405-billion model is too expensive for Meta to run at full scale. The company will provide more info after it assesses early usage, said Jon Carvill.
According to Al- Dahle, there is a ceiling coming, despite the industry’s growing consensus of running out of quality training data for models. He says they think there are a few more training runs. It is difficult to say.
For the first time, Meta’s red teaming (or adversarial testing) of Llama 3.1 included looking for potential cybersecurity and biochemical use cases. Another reason to test the model more strenuously is what Meta is describing as emerging “agentic” behaviors.
For example, Al-Dahle tells me that Llama 3.1 is capable of integrating with a search engine API to “retrieve information from the internet based on a complex query and call multiple tools in succession in order to complete your tasks.” Another example he gives is asking the model to plot the number of homes sold in the United States over the last five years. “It can retrieve the [web] search for you and generate the Python code and execute it.”
Meta’s own implementation of Llama is its AI assistant, which is positioned as a general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT and can be found in just about every part of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. After this week, it will be possible to see Llama 3.1 on the US version of the website, as well as on the Indonesian version and on the Facebook version. It’s being updated to support new languages as well, including French, German, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish.
A new “Imagine Me” feature in Meta AI scans your face through your phone’s camera to then let you insert your likeness into images it generates. By capturing your likeness this way and not through the photos in your profile, Meta is hopefully avoiding the creation of a deepfake machine. The company sees demand for people wanting to create more kinds of AI media and share it to their feeds, even if that means blurring the line between what is discernibly real and not.
Meta AI is also coming to the Quest headset in the coming weeks, replacing its voice command interface. Like the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, you will be able to learn about what you are looking at while in the passthrough mode that show the real world through the display.
Meta has yet to give any usage numbers for its assistant, despite predictions that it will be the Most-used chatbot by the end of this year. The entire industry is still early in its path towards product fit, according to Al- Dahle. Even with how much hype has been put out, it’s obvious that the race is just beginning.
Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses. Meta is giving away one of the world’s best artificial intelligence models for free.
In an open letter posted with the release of the new model, Meta’s CEO Zuckerberg compared Llama to the open source Linux operating system. Many big tech companies invested in closed alternatives when open source software was criticized as risky and unreliable. Today however Linux is widely used in cloud computing and serves as the core of the Android mobile OS.
