In a quick message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the corporate’s “open” AI mannequin household, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a 153% enhance over a roughly three-month interval.
Llama, which powers Meta’s AI assistant, Meta AI, throughout the tech big’s numerous platforms, together with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is part of Meta’s yearslong bid to foster a wide-ranging AI product ecosystem. The firm makes the fashions, in addition to the instruments required to fine-tune and customise them, accessible free of charge underneath a proprietary license.
Some builders and corporations have taken concern with the Llama license phrases, that are considerably commercially restrictive. Yet Llama has achieved widespread success since launching in 2023. Companies together with Spotify, AT&T, and DoorDash use Llama fashions in manufacturing as we speak.
That’s to not recommend that Meta hasn’t confronted setbacks.
Llama is on the heart of an AI copyright lawsuit that accuses Meta of coaching numerous fashions on copyrighted ebooks with out permission. Several EU international locations have compelled Meta to postpone — and in some circumstances cancel altogether — its Llama launch plans over information privateness considerations. And Llama’s efficiency has been leapfrogged by fashions like Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s R1.
Meta is alleged to have scrambled to arrange “struggle rooms” to use DeepSeek’s learnings to Llama’s personal growth, and the corporate just lately mentioned it will spend as a lot as $80 billion on initiatives associated to AI this 12 months.
Meta is planning to launch a number of Llama fashions over the following few months, together with “reasoning” fashions alongside the traces of OpenAI’s o3-mini and fashions with natively multimodal capabilities. Zuckerberg has additionally hinted at “agentic” options, suggesting that a few of these fashions will have the ability to take actions autonomously.
“I feel this very properly might be the 12 months when Llama and open supply grow to be essentially the most superior and broadly used AI fashions,” Zuckerberg mentioned throughout Meta’s This fall 2024 earnings name in January. “[O]ur purpose for [Llama this year] is to steer.”
We’re sure to study extra at LlamaCon, Meta’s first generative AI developer convention, which is scheduled to happen on April 29.
