In a short lived message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated the corporate’s “open” AI type circle of relatives, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a 153% building up over a roughly-three-month duration.
Llama, which powers Meta’s AI assistant, Meta AI, around the tech large’s quite a lot of platforms, together with Fb, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is part of Meta’s bid to foster a wide-ranging AI product ecosystem. The corporate makes the fashions and gear required to fine-tune and customise them to be had at no cost below a proprietary license.
Some builders and corporations have taken factor with the Llama license phrases, that are rather restrictive. But Llama has accomplished fashionable luck regardless of this. Firms together with Spotify use Llama fashions in manufacturing as of late.
That’s to not counsel that Meta hasn’t confronted setbacks. Llama is on the heart of an AI copyright lawsuit that accuses Meta of coaching a variety of Llama fashions on copyrighted ebooks with out authorization. In every other problem to Meta’s Llama ambitions, a number of EU international locations have pressured the corporate to delay — and in some circumstances cancel altogether — its type release plans over information privateness issues. And Llama’s efficiency has been leapfrogged by means of fashions like Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek’s R1.
Meta is alleged to have scrambled to arrange conflict rooms to decipher how DeepSeek decreased the price of working and deploying fashions, in order that it might follow the ones learnings to Llama’s personal building. And Meta not too long ago stated that it will spend up to $80 billion on tasks associated with AI this yr, together with AI hires and the development of recent AI information facilities.
Meta plans to release a number of Llama fashions over the following few months, together with “reasoning” fashions alongside the traces of OpenAI’s o3-mini and fashions with natively multimodal functions. Zuckerberg has additionally hinted at “agentic” functions, suggesting that long term Llama fashions will be capable to take sure movements autonomously.
A few of these is also introduced at LlamaCon, Meta’s first generative AI developer convention, which is scheduled to happen on April 29.
“I believe this rather well may well be the yr when Llama and open supply grow to be essentially the most complicated and extensively used AI fashions,” Zuckerberg stated all over Meta’s This autumn 2024 income name in January. “[O]ur purpose for [Llama this year] is to steer.”
