Meta is reportedly in the process of building a new, more powerful and open-source AI model to challenge the most powerful systems of its rival OpenAI.
Meta, the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, says it’s developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that will rival the most advanced model from OpenAI, according to a Wall Street Journal exclusive.
The Wall Street Journal reported that individuals familiar with the matter said Meta aims for the new AI model to be “several times” more powerful than its Llama 2 model, which it released earlier this year.
For the moment, The Wall Street Journal’s sources said that Meta’s plans for the new system are for it to be open-source and, therefore, allow other companies to build AI tools to produce high-level text, analysis and other types of output.
The company has also been building the data centers necessary to create such a high-level system while acquiring more of Nvidia’s H100 semiconductor chips, the most powerful and coveted chips currently available on the market.
Llama was trained on 70 billion parameters, and while OpenAI hasn’t released its parameters for GPT-4, they’re estimated to be around 1.5 trillion.
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The sources said Meta anticipates training for the large language model (LLM) to begin in early 2024 and to be ready for release sometime next year. It is likely to be released after Google’s forthcoming LLM Gemini.
Microsoft is a primary backer of OpenAI and has also collaborated with Meta to help make Llama 2 available on Azure, its cloud computing platform. However, the sources said Meta plans to train its upcoming model on its own infrastructure.
This development comes as major tech companies and governments are racing to create, deploy and control high-level AI systems.
Recently, the United Kingdom government announced that it planned to spend $130 million on high-powered chips to create AI systems.
Across the globe, in China, the country’s new legislation on AI recently went into effect. Since then, the CEO of Baidu, a major China-based tech company, has said that over 70 AI models have been released in the country.
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