Meta says Llama’s usage grew tremendously due to the power of open source

Meta has printed an replace on how its Llama giant language fashions are performing, they usually’re apparently doing so properly that they are now “approaching 350 million downloads so far.” That is 10 instances greater than the downloads it accrued in comparison with the identical time final yr. Roughly 20 million of these downloads passed off within the final month alone, after the corporate launched Llama 3.1, its newest LLM that it says can now rival OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s.

The month-to-month utilization of Llama grew ten instances from January to July this yr for a few of Meta’s largest cloud service suppliers, the corporate mentioned. From Might to July, particularly, hosted Llama utilization on its cloud companions greater than doubled by token quantity. Along with Amazon Net Companies (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the corporate teamed up with Databricks, Dell, Google Cloud, Groq, NVIDIA, IBM watsonx, Scale AI and Snowflake, amongst others, to make its LLMs extra available to builders.

Meta attributed Llama’s rising utilization to “the facility of open supply.” It mentioned that making the LLMs accessible to all allowed it to see “a vibrant and various AI ecosystem come to life the place builders have extra selection and functionality.” When Meta launched Llama 3.1, Mark Zuckerberg extolled the virtues of open supply AI, calling it the “path ahead.” He additionally talked concerning the steps Meta is taking to make open supply AI the business commonplace.

In its newest report, it gave examples of how firms are utilizing Llama for his or her wants. AT&T apparently makes use of Llama to fine-tune buyer searches, whereas DoorDash depends on the LLM to make duties simpler for its software program engineers. Llama additionally generates the real-time reactions of the creatures referred to as “Dots” in Niantic’s Tamagotchi-like sport Peridot. In the meantime, Zoom makes use of Llama (together with different LLMs) to energy its AI Companion that may summarize conferences and make sensible recordings. “The innovation has been broad and fast, from start-ups pushing new boundaries to enterprises of all sizes utilizing Llama to construct on-premises or by means of a cloud service supplier,” Meta wrote. “Trade is constructing and innovating with Llama, and we’re much more excited for what’s to come back.”