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

Open-source AI is lastly closing in on the dominance of closed-source. In the present day, 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 for the reason that 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 improve 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 inner and exterior use instances.

The replace reveals that open-source AI, which was initially off to a gradual begin, shouldn’t be solely matching closed-source when it comes to efficiency but additionally getting important traction on the enterprise stage, powering actual purposes. It additionally questions the lead of OpenAI, which has been referred to as out for failing to ship frontier AI merchandise past bulletins.

Whereas OpenAI had a headstart within the generative AI sport, 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 a substitute of going closed-source, it centered on an open strategy, making its ecosystem – masking Llama 2, Llama 3, and most just lately Llama 3.1 – out there by way of each Hugging Face and cloud companions.

“By making our Llama models openly available we’ve seen a vibrant and diverse AI ecosystem come to life where developers have more choice and capability than ever before. The innovation has been broad and rapid, from start-ups pushing new boundaries to enterprises of all sizes using Llama…,” the corporate wrote in a weblog put up right this moment. 

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 reaching 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. Because the 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 improve in traction coming from the current launch of Llama 3.1 405B.

“We’re seeing growing preference in the developer community for Llama and strong indicators for continued growth. According to a survey from Artificial Analysis, an independent site for AI benchmarking, Llama was the number two most considered model and the industry leader in open source,” the corporate added. 

Among the many enterprises tapping the Llama household of fashions for inner 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 nevertheless it did affirm that Llama’s month-to-month utilization (by the quantity of enter/output tokens) grew ten-fold from January to July 2024 for choose cloud service suppliers. 

The stats appear to point out that hosted Llama utilization has been rising constantly (peaking in July when Llama 3.1 was launched) however it is very important notice that these figures are just for a number of the firm’s largest cloud service suppliers, not all companions. 

This implies the precise month-to-month utilization stats might differ. 

Strain on OpenAI, Anthropic

Both approach, Llama’s adoption by main enterprises like AT&T and Spotify reveals that open-source AI is catching up shortly. The current enhancements in efficiency and long-term price advantages of the open strategy are among the many greatest components driving this shift. With additional developments within the coming months, we are able to anticipate open-source AI to utterly tackle the domination of closed fashions. It will put strain on corporations providing closed fashions, pushing them to innovate extra and additional lower 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 lower the costs of its present 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 to date, together with Sora and SearchGPT, both stay unreleased or out there solely to a choose group of customers.