Zuckerberg announces LIama 3.1: Meta's open-source to lead the charge

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company Meta, officially announced the best AI models named “LIama 3.1” on Tuesday. This cutting-edge artificial intelligence model is free of charge and accessible to everyone; it is open source.

Zuckerberg made his new move public in an open letter on Tuesday. The CEO wrote that his company is taking a “different approach” by making the new AI model accessible for everyone.

“We’re actively building partnerships so that more companies in the ecosystem can offer unique functionality to their customers as well,” he wrote.

Additionally, according to Facebook parent Meta, LIama is the world’s largest and most capable openly available foundation model” that can easily compete with companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Earlier, the company had already released two smaller versions of LIama 3.

“Llama 3.1 405B is the first openly available model that rivals the top AI models when it comes to state-of-the-art capabilities in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use, and multilingual translation,” Meta said, detailing the AI model.

Nevertheless, Meta’s new model, LIama is not multimodal like other AI apps, including OpenAI and Google’s latest models. It does not possess the feature to handle images, audio, and video.

Meta, however, says the model is significantly better at using other software, such as a web browser.

Meanwhile, the announcement also consists of Meta’s close relationship with Nvidia, which is a key partner and is providing Facebook’s parent company with computing chips called GPUs to help train its AI models, including the latest version of Llama.

Moreover, Meta targeted the closed-source approach to applications and how it could fill this gap.

“I believe that AI will develop in a similar way,” Zuckerberg wrote in his letter. “Today, several tech companies are developing leading closed models. But open source is quickly closing the gap.”