Meta AI Releases New Large Language Model LLaMA

Meta AI announced in a blog post the release of its new large language model called LLaMA. LLaMa is a 65-billion-parameter LLM that stands for Large Language Model for AI Assistance. It is a state-of-the-art language model designed to assist AI researchers and practitioners in developing and deploying NLP models who may not have access to the infrastructure required to run these kinds of models in a bid to “further democratize” the field of AI.

The LLaMA model is trained on a massive amount of text data from various sources, including web pages, books, and other written material. It has a capacity of 65 billion parameters, making it one of the largest language models available. It is trained on a diverse set of languages, with a particular focus on the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. This makes LLaMA a versatile tool for NLP researchers and practitioners worldwide. Like other large language models, LLaMA operates by predicting text from inputted prompts.

One of the primary goals of LLaMA is to help researchers and practitioners who are limited in resource capabilities, which often leaves them unable to fully utilize NLP models. In Meta’s blog post, they pointed to this problem by stating, “This restricted access has limited researchers’ ability to understand how and why these large language models work, hindering progress on efforts to improve their robustness and mitigate known issues, such as bias, toxicity, and the potential for generating misinformation.”

According to the model’s paper, in addition to assisting with fine-tuning, LLaMA also includes several features that make it easier for researchers and practitioners to experiment with different NLP models. It provides a streamlined interface for running experiments, including automatic hyperparameter tuning and early stopping. It also includes a powerful tool for visualizing and analyzing the results of experiments, which can help researchers understand why certain models are performing better than others.

Finally, LLaMA will be released under a non-commercial license that focuses on research use cases in a bid to maintain the integrity and prevent the possibility of misuse. So far, access to LLaMA will be granted on a case-by-case basis to academic researchers, NGOs, laboratories, and governmental organizations globally. The link to apply for access to LLaMA can be found here.