Meta Releases Llama 2 AI Model Free for Commercial Use
Meta opens its next-generation Llama 2 large language model to the public, making it free for both research and commercial applications. The company partners with Microsoft to distribute the model through Azure AI.
Meta releases Llama 2, its next-generation large language model, as an open-source tool available free of charge for both research and commercial use. The company believes that an open approach to generative AI drives economic and social opportunities by giving businesses, startups, and researchers access to powerful tools they could not easily build themselves. This release includes the model weights and starting code for the pretrained model as well as conversational fine-tuned versions.
The tech giant argues that opening access to AI models makes the technology safer by allowing a global community of developers to stress test and identify vulnerabilities. Meta builds on a decade of open-source AI research and responds to the massive demand for Llama 1, which generates over 100,000 access requests from researchers. By observing how the community uses these tools, Meta plans to learn, improve the models, and fix issues rapidly.
Meta expands its partnership with Microsoft to distribute Llama 2, making Microsoft the preferred partner for the new generative AI model. As announced at Microsoft Inspire, Llama 2 is now available in the Azure AI model catalog. This collaboration enables developers and businesses to easily integrate and deploy the open-source model within the Microsoft ecosystem.