Meta prioritizes open-source play, native Hindi support to rival OpenAI, Google

livemint.com:

Mint, Ragavan Srinivasan, vice-president of product and the head of its Llama models at Meta, said that the company’s open-source approach to AI will define its approach to generative AI for enterprises, going forward. “Building AI models as open-source is good for developers, Meta and the world in general, as we’ve seen with our work on Pytorch and React. Rivals of the Llama foundational model are all proprietary, which means that enterprises have to develop their AI applications based on the terms defined by the companies making the models.

As generative AI becomes integrated into the internet, we’d look to provide open intelligence in order to ensure that a rich developer and partner ecosystem builds around Llama," Srinivasan said. Srinivasan’s statement on the latest models, which natively support processing of queries and inferences in Hindi (among other languages), echoes Tuesday’s post by Zuckerberg on expanding its open-source approach. “We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open-source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models.

In addition to having significantly better cost and performance relative to closed models, the fact that the 405B model is open will make it the best choice for fine-tuning and distilling smaller models," the executive said in a blog post. Industry stakeholders largely welcomed the move. Kashyap Kompella, chief executive of AI research and consultancy firm RPA2AI Research, said that Meta’s push for AI is multi-pronged.