Meta’s Llama artificial intelligence (AI) models are used by companies including Goldman Sachs and AT&T for business purposes such as customer service, document review and computer code generation, the social media giant said in a statement on Thursday.
The llama models, which are mostly free, have been downloaded nearly 350 million times since Meta began making them publicly available last year. That’s up from the 300 million downloads the company announced when it released the biggest version of its latest model, Llama 3, in late July.
Usage of cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure also increased, more than doubling between May and July of this year, Meta said.
The announcement comes after Meta and other tech companies investing billions of dollars in AI have faced questions from investors about how widespread adoption of the technology appears to be and what benefits they can expect in return for their investments.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that creating cutting-edge AI models and making them freely available is the best way to ensure the company doesn’t find itself constrained by competitors’ proprietary technology.
“The path to Llama becoming an industry standard is through consistent competitiveness, efficiency, and openness, generation after generation,” Zuckerberg wrote last month.
While advanced language models like Llama delight users with their ability to generate human-like prose on demand, they still struggle to perform certain logical tasks and are prone to making factual errors, which limits their use in business contexts.
Still, Meta pointed to several large companies testing Llama models, which is both proof of their usefulness and confirmation of their competitiveness against paid alternatives such as models from industry leader OpenAI.
Other companies it says use Llama include Japanese bank Nomura Holdings, food delivery company DoorDash and professional services provider Accenture.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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