Meta confirmed on Tuesday (18) the release of Llama 2, its open source and free large language model (LLM). The announcement revealed that Microsoft will partner with Mark Zuckerberg’s company in this debut. Llama 2 will be free for both search and commercial use, and will be available on Microsoft Azure, Windows, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Hugging Face.
The release of this new version of Llama comes as no surprise. Last Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Meta was close to announcing the commercial version of its LLM. Llama is a technology that can be used as generative AI. Previously, it was only available to the academic public and researchers.
Llama 2 ad has photo of Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO
To announce the launch of LLaMA 2, Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, on his Instagram account.
In the caption, the executive thanks his colleague and rival and the Microsoft and Meta teams responsible for the development of Llama (yes, according to the company, he writes “Llama” and no longer “LLaMA”). The CEO of Meta also recalls the years-long partnership between the two companies.
Meta has a long history of providing open source for our infrastructure and our work with artificial intelligence (AI) – from PyTorch [partnering with Microsoft], the leading machine learning framework, to models like Segment Anything, ImageBind and Dino, to core infrastructures as part of the Open Compute Project foundation.”
Mark Zuckerberg
According to Meta, Llama 2 was trained with 40% more data than its predecessor.
Microsoft released Copilot pricing on Tuesday
On the same day that Microsoft announced the partnership with Meta for the launch of Llama 2, the company founded by Bill Gates disclosed the prices of Windows 365 Copilot, its GPT-4-based AI tool that works integrated with apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint
