Meta and Microsoft Collaborate To Introduce Llama 2

Adekunle Joshua

Big Tech firms Meta and Microsoft join forces to launch Llama 2, an open-source large language model. It'll be featured on Microsoft’s Windows and Azure cloud platform

Llama 2 is free for research and commercial use, optimized to run on Windows

Meta’s AI tech stack powers Llama 2, which was trained on 40% more online data sources compared to Llama 1

It can process twice as much context, making it great for businesses and researchers

Llama 2 outperforms many open-source LLMs in coding, proficiency, reasoning, and knowledge tests

However, it's not as efficient as closed-source competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4, as stated in a research paper by Meta

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on July 18, called Llama 2 the foundation for researchers and businesses to build with their next-gen large language model

Llama 1's demand was impressive, with over 100,000 access requests, but ChatGPT surpassed it with an estimated 100 million or more users in the first three months

Meta faced criticism for open-sourcing Llama, with concerns about potential misuse due to "minimal" protections, according to two U.S. senators in June