Meta made a significant stride in the AI landscape today by releasing the Llama 3.1 family of AI models, boasting performance that rivals leading closed-source models. Notably, the Llama 3.1 405B model outperforms OpenAI"s GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in several AI benchmarks. Beyond performance, Llama 3.1"s standout feature is its open-source nature. The complete Llama 3.1 model, including weights, is now available for download, with Meta even updating its license to permit training on Llama 3.1 model outputs.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta"s Founder and CEO, expressed his vision for an open AI ecosystem in a separate blog post. He believes Llama has the potential to become the "Linux of AI." Just as Linux, through its open-source nature, has become the industry standard for cloud computing and mobile operating systems, Zuckerberg envisions open-source AI achieving similar ubiquity. He highlighted that the open-source Llama 3.1 already competes with, and in some cases surpasses, the most advanced models. Looking ahead, he predicts that future Llama models will lead the industry in advancement.
Zuckerberg"s rationale for why open source AI benefits developers and the industry is detailed below.
- We need to train, fine-tune, and distill our own models. Every organization has different needs that are best met with models of different sizes that are trained or fine-tuned with their specific data. On-device tasks and classification tasks require small models, while more complicated tasks require larger models. Now you’ll be able to take the most advanced Llama models, continue training them with your own data and then distill them down to a model of your optimal size – without us or anyone else seeing your data.
- We need to control our own destiny and not get locked into a closed vendor. Many organizations don’t want to depend on models they cannot run and control themselves. They don’t want closed model providers to be able to change their model, alter their terms of use, or even stop serving them entirely. They also don’t want to get locked into a single cloud that has exclusive rights to a model. Open source enables a broad ecosystem of companies with compatible toolchains that you can move between easily.
- We need to protect our data. Many organizations handle sensitive data that they need to secure and can’t send to closed models over cloud APIs. Other organizations simply don’t trust the closed model providers with their data. Open source addresses these issues by enabling you to run the models wherever you want. It is well-accepted that open source software tends to be more secure because it is developed more transparently.
- We need a model that is efficient and affordable to run. Developers can run inference on Llama 3.1 405B on their own infra at roughly 50% the cost of using closed models like GPT-4o, for both user-facing and offline inference tasks.
- We want to invest in the ecosystem that’s going to be the standard for the long term. Lots of people see that open source is advancing at a faster rate than closed models, and they want to build their systems on the architecture that will give them the greatest advantage long term.
Zuckerberg also explained why open source AI is good for Meta. Instead of relying solely on closed AI system companies and its policies, Meta can truly innovate without any restrictions. Also, Meta"s successful track record in the past with open-source projects, like Open Compute Project and PyTorch, further reinforces the benefits of this approach for long-term growth and innovation.
You can read Mark Zuckerberg"s full blog post here.