🧙🏼‍♂️ Llama 3.1 is awesome

Howdy, wizards.

Today it’s all about the new Llama in town. If GPT-4o is Microsoft Word, then Llama 3.1 405B is Google Docs – an open version that’s equally good.

Let’s dive in!

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The most important news stories in AI this week

Meta releases the first open source frontier-level AI model. Comes in 8B, 70B and 405B sizes – the latter is on par with the best closed models to date, including the top models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Zuckerberg also wrote a letter detailing his thoughts on why open source AI is good. Try the new model here. Full details below.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Meta is making a big play here not simply on an open source model, but rather a full scale open ecosystem which could become the industry standard where most AI development happens. Realising that vision would definitely bring influence and monetization opportunities to Meta, even without users paying for access to its models.

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Behind the news

Meta's Llama 3.1 is here

Meta has released its latest series of AI models: Llama 3.1. They come in 8B, 7B and 405B sizes. Notably, the 405B model is the first open-source model to be approximately on the level of the leading closed models, namely GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

The 405B model is the most open, modifiable and cost-effective frontier-level model to date. An open weights model like 405B means developers will have flexibility to distill the model down to whatever size needed, so it can be tailored to any application. All at a much lower price than closed systems; Zuckerberg said in an interview that doing inference with the 405B model would be about 50% cheaper than using GPT-4o.

Meta’s long game here is building a vibrant ecosystem of development and resource sharing around the model. In addition to the models themselves, Meta is actively working on creating tools around them to make developing AI agents and apps easier, such as a reference system, safety tools and improvement mechanisms for the API. Meta has 25 partners ready to go with tools to fine-tune and distill the model, as well as the biggest cloud infrastructure providers, including AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more.

You can try Llama 3.1 405B in the US on WhatsApp or at meta.ai.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The new Llama models essential close the gap in performance between closed and open-source models. Zuck’s vision with Llama is not to become “the one” AI model but rather that there would be many powerful models in the world co-existing.

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