Will Meta's massive leak democratise AI – and at what cost?

Last week, Meta announced LLaMA, its latest stab at making a GPT-style "large language model"*. If AI is the future of tech, then big tech companies need to control their own models or be left behind by the competition. LLaMA joins OpenAI's GPT (licensed by Microsoft for Bing and underpinning OpenAI's own ChatGPT) and Google's LaMDA (which will power Bard, its ChatGPT rival) in the upper echelons of the field. It says that LLaMA is a "smaller, more performant model" than its peers, built to achieve the same feats of comprehension and articulation with a smaller footprint in terms of compute*, and so has a correspondingly smaller environmental impact. But the company also sought to differentiate itself in another way, by making LLaMA "open", implicitly pointing out that despite its branding, "OpenAI" is anything but.