Facebook parent Meta Platforms on Tuesday unveiled Llama 2, an open-source version of its AI model. Unlike its predecessor—Llama, short for large language model Meta AI—the new version will be free to use for research and commercial purposes.

In an effort to prevent misuse, the tech giant had restricted access to Llama, a collection of models whose working is similar to chatbots in terms of generating text and code. It was eventually leaked online. In the blog post announcing the release of Llama 2, Meta said it received over 100,000 requests to access the earlier model ever since it was unveiled in February.

“We believe an open approach is the right one for the development of today’s AI models, especially those in the generative space where the technology is rapidly advancing. By making AI models available openly, they can benefit everyone,” the company said in the blog post.

Meta claims Llama 2 “outperforms” chat models on most benchmarks, including “helpfulness and safety”, and has been trained on a mix of publicly available data. However, it clarified that the model cannot access any data from Meta’s products, services and websites, which contain a trove of personal information, according to a detailed report by the tech giant.

Llama 2 has been trained with 2 trillion tokens of data to enhance its knowledge and reduce “hallucinations”—inaccuracies by AI models. In comparison, Google’s flagship large language model, PaLM 2, was trained on 3.6 million tokens. Tokens are building blocks to train language models, teaching them to predict the next word in a sequence.

Meta has partnered with Microsoft for the project. Llama 2 is available on Microsoft’s Azure AI model catalog and is optimized for the Windows operating system.

However, there is a caveat: Llama 2 has been primarily trained on English data, so it might not be as effective in other languages. Apart from that, Meta has also admitted that Llama 2 has its own set of biases because of imbalances in training data. For example, it uses more “he” pronouns than “she” pronouns and is skewed to the West, falling short on “toxicity” benchmarks.

Nevertheless, free, commercial access to a sophisticated model like Llama 2 could challenge the status quo and disrupt the current standing of generative AI players like OpenAI, which is also backed by Microsoft.

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