The open-source artificial intelligence model Llama from Meta Platforms will soon be available in a commercial version, the firm announced . This will provide start-ups and other companies with a strong free alternative to the pricy proprietary models offered by OpenAI and Google. Microsoft is "our preferred partner" for the rollout of the new model, dubbed Llama 2, which will be distributed through Azure and run on the Windows operating system, according to Meta in a blog post.

 

According to the blog post and a different Facebook post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the model, which Meta previously only offered to specific academics for research purposes, will also be made accessible via direct download and through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face, and other providers.

 

“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open.”

 

Making a model as complex as Llama widely accessible and free for companies to build on poses a threat to the early market dominance achieved by players like OpenAI, whose models Microsoft supports and which it already makes available to business customers via Azure. While the new Llama has been trained on 40% more data than its predecessor and has received more than 1 million human annotations to improve the quality of its outputs, Zuckerberg said that the previous Llama was already competitive with models that power OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot.

 

“Commercial Llama could change the picture,” said Amjad Masad, chief executive at software developer platform Replit, who said more than 80% of projects there use OpenAI’s models.