Tech Tonic | Meta Llama's spark, and countries vying for AI supremacy
It is human nature to take things at face value. Most of us would be guilty of doing that with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and chatbots. We were told, and we believed, that chatbots are the gospel for truth. Many of us also went around with prompts that often didn’t mean much, and chose which among OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity and Meta had the superior AI.
Meta AI's Evolution
Meta AI, a basic experience integrated within WhatsApp and Instagram, often didn’t elicit much confidence. The thing is, Meta was purely sandbagging (you’d be partly right; it wasn’t outstanding). They didn’t want to show what the Llama models were capable of. Until now.
In the past few days and weeks, we’ve had a layered perspective on what Meta’s Llama models are capable of. OpenAI and everyone else have reason to be worried, though they’ve each made progress with their models.
Advancements in AI Models
OpenAI’s own GPT-4o is as good as it gets, and the next iteration is supposed to be even more powerful. In late September, Meta released an updated Llama 3 AI model, Llama 3.2 which became the first open-source model capable of processing images and text. It could prove useful for augmented reality (AR) developers. Meta’s got stakes there, with Ray-Ban Meta glasses going from strength to strength.
Mobile devices and edge computing weren’t ignored, with simpler, text-only models (1B and 3B parameters).
Integration with Government Agencies
Just this week, Meta AI made it clear that it is ready for war. Meta says they’re making Llama available to US government agencies, which includes defence and national security applications for the country, as well as private sector partners working in sync.
Applications of Llama Models
There are examples of Llama that will be used, becoming clearer. Oracle will use the Llama models to simplify and make more coherent aircraft maintenance documents for technicians, with an expectation that it’ll help speed up diagnosis and repair time.
Scale AI, another AI company, will deploy Llama as a layer of support for “specific national security team missions, such as planning operations and identifying adversaries’ vulnerabilities.”
Global Government Implementations of AI
For governments globally, AI can be useful in a variety of resource and time-intensive implementations — expanding the scope of healthcare, monitoring infrastructure, handling large swathes of data and cyber security tasks, being some.
AI will play an important role in streamlining processes. In India, the government has started on an AI journey. Bhashini, an AI translation system by the Digital India Corporation, is an example.
The IUDX Program, a collaboration that brings the ministry of housing and urban affairs, the ministry of electronics and information technology, and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru together, is using data models for analysis and insights to improve urban governance and service delivery.
The Future of AI
Coming back to Meta, as I close this week’s thoughts. They aren’t done yet. A few days ago, Zuckerberg said that the company’s next model, expected to be called Llama 4, is being trained on a cluster of GPUs (graphics processing units, computing hardware) that is “bigger than anything” used for any models till now.
The next stage of these AI battles could very well be one for governments vying for superiority with artificial intelligence. AI companies will have a prime role in that battlefront.
