Meta is building AI model to rival OpenAI’s most powerful system

Meta, the parent company to social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, says it’s developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) that will rival the most advanced model from OpenAI, according to a Wall Street Journal exclusive. 

WSJ reported that individuals familiar with the matter said Meta aims for the new AI model to be “several times” more powerful than its Llama 2 model, which it released earlier this year.

For the moment, the WSJ sources say Meta’s plans for the new system are for it to be open-source, and therefore allow other companies to build AI tools to produce high-level text, analysis and other types of output.

The company has also been building data centers necessary to create such a high-level system while acquiring more of Nvidia’s H100 semiconductor chips – the most powerful and coveted chips currently available on the market.

Llama was trained on 70 billion parameters, and while OpenAI hasn’t released its parameters for GPT-4; it’s estimated around 1.5 trillion.

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The sources said Meta anticipates training to begin for the large language model (LLM) in early 2024 and to be ready for release sometime next year. It is likely to be released after Google’s expected forthcoming LLM Gemini.

Microsoft is a primary backer of OpenAI and also collaborated with Meta to help make Llama 2 available on Azure, its cloud-computing platform. However, the sources said Meta plans to train its upcoming model on its own infrastructure. 

This development comes as major tech companies and governments are racing to create, deploy and control high-level AI systems. 

Recently, the United Kingdom government announced that it plans to spend $130 million on high-powered chips to create AI systems.

Across the globe in China, the country’s new legislation on AI recently went into effect. Since then the CEO of Baidu, a major China-based tech company, said that over 70 AI models have been released in the country.

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