Meta leads open-source AI growth, Llama downloads surge 10x year-over-year

Open-source AI is lastly closing in on the dominance of closed-source. Right this moment, Meta, one of many main gamers within the open mannequin class, shared a mid-year replace claiming that the adoption of its Llama household of fashions has surged to new heights, particularly because the launch of the giant Llama 3.1 final month.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led firm revealed that the downloads for Llama fashions are approaching 350 million on Hugging Face, marking an over ten-fold enhance from a yr in the past. It additionally famous that the adoption of the fashions has grown considerably – each by way of Hugging Face and distribution companions – with giant enterprises like Zoom, Spotify, Infosys, AT&T and Goldman Sachs utilizing them throughout inside and exterior use instances.

The replace reveals that open-source AI, which was initially off to a sluggish begin, is just not solely matching closed-source when it comes to efficiency but additionally getting important traction on the enterprise degree, powering actual functions. It additionally questions the lead of OpenAI, which has been known as out for failing to ship frontier AI merchandise past bulletins.

Whereas OpenAI had a headstart within the generative AI recreation, Meta was fast to leap on the bandwagon with its Llama mannequin. The corporate launched the mannequin three months after the one behind ChatGPT. Nevertheless, as an alternative of going closed-source, it centered on an open strategy, making its ecosystem – masking Llama 2, Llama 3, and most not too long ago Llama 3.1 – obtainable by way of each Hugging Face and cloud companions.

“By making our Llama fashions overtly obtainable we’ve seen a vibrant and various AI ecosystem come to life the place builders have extra alternative and functionality than ever earlier than. The innovation has been broad and fast, from start-ups pushing new boundaries to enterprises of all sizes utilizing Llama…,” the corporate wrote in a weblog put up at present. 

French startup Mistral has additionally adopted the similar technique for a lot of of its fashions. This has given builders a number of, highly effective open fashions to construct upon and create derivatives attaining parity and even outperforming closed fashions on choose metrics (see FinGPT, BioBert, Defog SQLCoder and Phind). 

For Meta, the open technique began gaining traction solely after the launch of Llama 2 in July final yr. For the reason that launch, the downloads for the corporate’s fashions have surged greater than 10x on Hugging Face, touching practically 350 million. Final month, the corporate noticed greater than 20 million downloads on the platform — which reveals an additional enhance in traction coming from the latest launch of Llama 3.1 405B.

“We’re seeing rising choice within the developer neighborhood for Llama and robust indicators for continued progress. In response to a survey from Synthetic Evaluation, an unbiased web site for AI benchmarking, Llama was the quantity two most thought-about mannequin and the {industry} chief in open supply,” the corporate added. 

Among the many enterprises tapping the Llama household of fashions for inside and exterior use instances are AT&T, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Niantic, Nomura, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, Infosys and KPMG.

Many enterprise builders are additionally tapping Llama fashions by way of Meta’s expansive community of cloud and infrastructure suppliers, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Groq, Nvidia, Databricks and Snowflake. The corporate didn’t share partner-specific numbers but it surely did verify that Llama’s month-to-month utilization (by the amount of enter/output tokens) grew ten-fold from January to July 2024 for choose cloud service suppliers. 

The stats appear to indicate that hosted Llama utilization has been rising constantly (peaking in July when Llama 3.1 was launched) however you will need to notice that these figures are just for among the firm’s largest cloud service suppliers, not all companions. 

This implies the precise month-to-month utilization stats could range. 

Strain on OpenAI, Anthropic

Both method, Llama’s adoption by main enterprises like AT&T and Spotify reveals that open-source AI is catching up shortly. The latest enhancements in efficiency and long-term value advantages of the open strategy are among the many greatest elements driving this shift. With additional developments within the coming months, we will anticipate open-source AI to utterly tackle the domination of closed fashions. This may put stress on firms providing closed fashions, pushing them to innovate extra and additional reduce down the price of utilizing their fashions.

Notably, the influence of the open-source motion can already be seen. OpenAI, which triggered the generative AI wave, has considerably reduce the costs of its current fashions, together with GPT-4o. 

Nevertheless, when it comes to product innovation, the Sam Altman-led analysis lab seems to be lagging now. All of the cutting-edge AI merchandise it has introduced up to now, together with Sora and SearchGPT, both stay unreleased or obtainable solely to a choose group of customers.