This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Meta’s large language model and AI assistant are receiving updates.
On Thursday the company released the first Llama 3 models in two sizes, parameters 8B and 70B. They have also been integrated into Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant.
“With this new model, we believe Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an Instagram post Thursday.
Meta said in a blog post Thursday that its latest models have seen “substantially reduced false rejection rates, better alignment, and greater diversity in model responses,” as well as advances in reasoning, code generation, and instructions.
“With Llama 3, we set out to create the best open models that are on par with the best proprietary models available today,” the post reads. “This next generation of Llama demonstrates cutting-edge performance across a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new features, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models in their class, period.”
Although Meta bills Llama as open source, Llama 2 required companies with over 700 million monthly active users to request a license from the company to use it, which Meta may or may not grant.
In the near future, Meta hopes to “make Llama 3 multilingual and multimodal, have longer context, and continue to improve the overall performance of core LLM features such as reasoning and coding,” the company said in the blog post.
What do the changes mean for Meta AI now?
The AI assistant can help you with tasks like recommending restaurants, planning trips, and making your emails more professional.
Using Meta AI’s Imagine feature now also produces sharper, faster images: They’ll start appearing as you type and change “every few letters you type,” according to a press release issued Thursday.
Meta AI is available on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and browsers. The company says multi-modal Meta AI will also be coming to its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses soon. It is available in English in more than a dozen countries outside the United States.
As for what comes next, Meta says it is working on models with parameters above 400B that are still in the training phase.
“I don’t think many people today really think about Meta AI when they think about the major AI assistants that people use,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in an article published Thursday. “But I think this is when we’re really going to start introducing it to a lot of people, and I expect it to be a pretty big product.”
Meta AI, of course, faces stiff competition from better-known AI assistants, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Anthropic’s Claude.