Recent breakthroughs in AI, and generative AI in particular, have captured the public’s imagination and demonstrated what those developing these technologies have long known — they have the potential to help people do incredible things, create a new era of economic and social opportunities, and give individuals, creators, and businesses new ways to express themselves and connect with people.
Meta and Microsoft believe an open approach is the right one for developing today’s AI models, especially those in the generative space where technology is rapidly advancing. By making AI models available openly, they can benefit everyone. Giving businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, and researchers access to tools developed at a scale that would be challenging to build themselves, backed by computing power they might not otherwise access, will open up a world of opportunities for them to experiment, innovate in exciting ways, and ultimately benefit from economically and socially.
And they believe it’s safer. Opening access to today’s AI models means a generation of developers and researchers can stress test them, identifying and solving problems fast as a community. By seeing how others use these tools, the teams can learn from them, improve those tools, and fix vulnerabilities.
Meta has put exploratory research, open source, and collaboration with academic and industry partners at the heart of their AI efforts for over a decade. They have seen first-hand how innovation in the open can lead to technologies that benefit more people. Developers and researchers have already released dozens of large language models and are driving progress. Businesses are using them as core ingredients for new generative AI-powered experiences. They have been blown away by the huge demand for Llama 1 from researchers — with more than 100,000 requests for access to the large language model — and the amazing things they’ve achieved by building on top of it.
Together Meta and Microsoft are now ready to open-source the next version of Llama 2 and are making it free for research and commercial use. They include model weights and starting code for the pre-trained model and conversational fine-tuned versions. As Satya Nadella announced on stage at Microsoft Inspire, they’re taking the partnership to the next level with Microsoft as their preferred partner for Llama 2 and expanding their efforts in generative AI. Starting today, Llama 2 is available in the Azure AI model catalogue, enabling developers using Microsoft Azure to build with it and leverage their cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features. It is also optimised to run locally on Windows, giving developers a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to customers across different platforms. Llama 2 is available through Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hugging Face, and other providers.
People and businesses have benefited from the longstanding partnership between Microsoft and Meta. Together they’ve introduced an open ecosystem for interchangeable AI frameworks and co-authored research papers to advance the state of the art in AI. They’ve collaborated to scale the adoption of PyTorch — today’s leading AI framework created by Meta and the AI community — on Azure, and they’re among the founding members of the PyTorch Foundation. Microsoft and Meta recently joined a cohort of supporters that endorse the Partnership on AI’s framework for collective action in creating and sharing synthetic media. The partnership extends outside of AI and into the metaverse to deliver immersive experiences for the future of work and play.
With this expanded partnership, Microsoft and Meta are supporting an open approach to provide increased access to foundational AI technologies to benefit businesses globally. Not just Meta and Microsoft believe in democratising access to today’s AI models. They have a broad range of diverse supporters around the world who believe in this approach, too — including companies that have given us early feedback and are excited to build new products with Llama 2, cloud providers that will include Llama 2 in their offerings for customers, research institutions who are collaborating with us on the safe and responsible deployment of large generative models, and people across tech, academia, and policy who see the benefits as we do.
A Focus on Responsibility
The open-source approach promotes transparency and access. They know that AI has brought huge advances to society but also comes with risks. Both the companies are committed to building responsibly and are providing several resources to help those who use Llama 2 do so too
- Red-teaming Exercises: Their fine-tuned models have been red-teamed — tested for safety — through internal and external efforts. The team worked to generate adversarial prompts to facilitate model fine-tuning. In addition, they commissioned third parties to conduct external adversarial testing across our fine-tuned models to similarly identify performance gaps. These safety fine-tuning processes are iterative; they will continue to invest in safety through fine-tuning and benchmarking and plan to release updated fine-tuned models based on these efforts.
- Transparency Schematic: They explain their fine-tuning and evaluation methods for the model and identify its shortcomings. The transparency schematic, located within the research paper, discloses known challenges and issues they’ve experienced and provides insight into mitigations taken and future ones they intend to explore.
- Responsible Use Guide: They created this guide as a resource to support developers with best practices for responsible development and safety evaluations. It outlines best practices reflective of current, state-of-the-art research on responsible generative AI discussed across the industry and the AI research community.
- Acceptable Use Policy: They put a policy that prohibits certain use cases to help ensure that these models are being used fairly and responsibly. Meta has also created new initiatives to harness the insight and creativity of individuals, researchers, and developers worldwide to get feedback on how the models are performing and how they might be improved.
- Open Innovation AI Research Community: They also launched a new partnership program for academic researchers to deepen our understanding of the responsible development and sharing of large language models. Researchers may apply to join a community of practitioners to share learnings on this important topic, and the community will form a research agenda to pursue going forward.
- Llama Impact Challenge: They want to activate the community of innovators who aspire to use Llama to solve hard problems. We are launching a challenge to encourage diverse public, non-profit, and for-profit entities to use Llama 2 to address environmental, education and other important challenges. The challenge rules will be available before the start of it.
Conclusion
Throughout their company’s history, they’ve experienced the benefits of an open-source approach when innovating in other business areas. The engineers developed and shared frameworks that are now industry standards — like React, a leading framework for making web and mobile applications, and PyTorch, now the leading framework for AI. These became commonly used infrastructure for the entire technology industry. They believe that openly sharing today’s large language models will also support the development of helpful and safer generative AI.
