Microsoft and Meta, two of the world’s leading tech companies, have introduced LLama 2, an open-sourced large language model for generative AI applications. The announcement was made during Microsoft’s annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire.
LLama 2 are a family of LLMs with different sizes of models suited to different applications. Unlike some competing AI models, LLama 2 is available as an open-source tool to everyone free of charge.
Speaking about the decision to make their latest AI model open-sourced, Meta released the following statement – “We believe an open approach is the right one for the development of today’s AI models. By making AI models available openly, they can benefit everyone, giving businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, and researchers access to tools developed at a scale that would be challenging to build themselves, backed by computing power they might not otherwise access,”
LLama 2 is the latest invention to come out of the partnership between Meta and Microsoft, which started with their collaboration on the deep-learning framework PyTorch. “Today’s announcement builds on our partnership to accelerate innovation in the era of AI and further extends Microsoft’s open model ecosystem and position as the world’s supercomputing platform for AI.”, said John Montgomery, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure.
The model is available for download via Meta’s launch partners Microsoft Azure, Hugging Face, and Amazon Web Services.