Meta launches commercial version of its AI model

Meta is launching a commercial version of its AI model LLaMA to compete with OpenAI and Google. LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, was publicly announced in February as a small foundational model, and was made available to researchers and academics.

 The new commercial version will allow startups and businesses to build custom software on top of the technology, while also improve the open-source AI model.  

Since it's an open-source AI technology, commercial access to LLaMA gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to adapt and improve the AI, accelerating technological innovation across various sectors and potentially leading to more robust models.  

Meta's LLaMA is available in 7, 13, 33, and 65 billion parameters, compared to ChatGPT's LLM, GPT-3.5, which has been confirmed to have 175 billion parameters. OpenAI hasn't said how many parameters GPT-4 has, but it's estimated to have over 1 trillion parameters -- the more parameters, the better the model can understand input and generate appropriate output. 

Currently, OpenAI leads the AI race, with ChatGPT as its sprinter, an AI chatbot that unleashed a generative AI revolution with its release in November. Microsoft has made hefty investments into OpenAI too. Google has its own AI chatbot, Bard, and proprietary LLMs but none of these systems are open source.