Meta to make new version of AI model available free of charge on Microsoft

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is making a commercial version of its artificial intelligence model freely available, in a move that gives startups and other businesses a low-cost opportunity compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. A new version of a Meta large language model (LLM), called Llama 2, will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, Meta said in a blogpost, referring to Microsoft as "our preferred partner" for the release. LLMs underpin generative AI products like the ChatGPT chatbot, although ChatGPT's owner has not open-sourced – or made widely available to others – its LLM, called GPT-4. The model, which Meta previously provided only to select academics for research purposes, also will be made available via direct download and through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face and other providers. "Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.