In a short message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated the corporate’s “open” AI mannequin household, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a 153% improve over a roughly-three-month interval.
Llama, which powers Meta’s AI assistant, Meta AI, throughout the tech large’s varied platforms, together with Fb, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is part of Meta’s yearslong bid to foster a wide-ranging AI product ecosystem. The corporate makes the fashions, in addition to the instruments required to fine-tune and customise them, obtainable free of charge beneath a proprietary license.
Some builders and corporations have taken concern with the Llama license phrases, that are considerably commercially restrictive. But Llama has achieved widespread success since launching in 2023 regardless of this. Firms together with Spotify, AT&T, and DoorDash use Llama fashions in manufacturing as we speak.
That’s to not recommend that Meta hasn’t confronted setbacks.
Llama is on the heart of an AI copyright lawsuit that accuses Meta of coaching a variety of fashions on copyrighted ebooks with out permission. A number of EU nations have pressured Meta to postpone — and in some instances cancel altogether — its Llama launch plans over information privateness issues. And Llama’s efficiency has been leapfrogged by fashions like Chinese language AI lab DeepSeek’s R1.
Meta is claimed to have scrambled to arrange “struggle rooms” to use DeepSeek’s learnings to Llama’s personal improvement, and the corporate not too long ago stated it could spend as a lot as $80 billion on tasks associated to AI this yr.
Meta is planning to launch a number of Llama fashions over the following few months, together with “reasoning” fashions alongside the traces of OpenAI’s o3-mini and fashions with natively multimodal capabilities. Zuckerberg has additionally hinted at “agentic” options, suggesting that a few of these fashions will be capable to take actions autonomously.
“I feel this very properly might be the yr when Llama and open supply turn out to be probably the most superior and extensively used AI fashions,” Zuckerberg stated throughout Meta’s This autumn 2024 earnings name in January. “[O]ur aim for [Llama this year] is to steer.”
We’re sure to be taught extra at LlamaCon, Meta’s first generative AI developer convention, which is scheduled to happen on April 29.
