Why Llama 3 is changing everything in the world of AI | Digital Trends
In the world of AI, you’ve no doubt heard about what OpenAI and Google have been up to. And now, Meta’s Llama LLM (large language model) is becoming an increasingly important player in the game, especially with its open-source nature. Meta recently made a big splash with the launch of its Llama 3 AI model, and it’s shaken up the field dramatically.
The Advantages of Llama 3
The reasons why are multiple and varied. It’s free to use, it has a wide user base, and yes, it’s open source, to name but a few. Here’s why Llama 3 is taking the AI industry by storm and may shape its future for some time to come.
We can debate until the cows come home about how useful AIs like ChatGPT and Llama 3 are in the real world — they’re not bad at teaching you board game rules — but the few benchmarks we have for how capable these AI are give Llama 3 a distinct advantage.
Performance and Efficiency
Some of the Llama 3 developers have been sharing tests comparing the latest models against some of the leading alternatives and, in many cases, Llama 3 comes out on top. These benchmarks cover mathematics, natural language processing, coding abilities, and general knowledge and understanding.
It’s here! Meet Llama 3, our latest generation of models that is setting a new standard for state-of-the art performance and efficiency for openly available LLMs.
Open Source and Accessibility
Don’t take their word for it, though. You can test Llama 3 against itself and a range of other AI models in the AI Arena.
Where price matters for users, code transparency matters for developers. Unlike the proprietary platform AIs, like ChatGPT and its various language models, Llama 3 is open source. That means that developers can look at how it runs and make changes to it. They can iterate on top of it and take the project in their own intriguing directions.
Future Developments
One of the biggest drawbacks of large language model AIs like Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, or previous iterations of Meta’s Llama is that they take an inordinate amount of computing power. But Llama 3 can run locally on consumer laptop hardware.
This is not the final version of Llama 3, however. It uses 70 billion parameters in its responses, but there are internal versions of Llama that utilize up to 400 billion parameters. Llama 3 is also far from the first LLM to be run locally, but it is the most capable yet.
Potential and Limitations
Llama 3 is amazing, but there’s a lot it can’t do just yet. It is currently entirely text-based, which means it isn’t the multimodal AI that we’ve seen with ChatGPT and similar services. It can’t process video, or audio, or images. It can’t respond to vocal commands or speak back to you.
But it will soon be able to do all those things — and likely more. Llama 3 is a warning shot across the bow of many AI developers signaling that the time of smaller startups stealing the limelight in AI development may be over.
