Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on January 31, 2024. 

Photo: Susan Walsh, File (AP)

Meta is taking on its artificial intelligence rivals with the latest version of its Llama model, saying open-source AI is “good for the world.”

The open-source Llama 3.1 models released Tuesday, which Meta calls its “most capable” to date, include its largest model, Llama 3.1 405B, which stands for 405 billion parameters, or the variables a model learns from training data that guide its behavior. Llama 3.1 405B rivals its closed-source competitors from OpenAI and Google in “state-of-the-art capabilities,” including general knowledge, math, and translating languages, Meta said. The release also includes upgraded versions of its 8B and 70B models which were introduced in April.

Llama 3.1 405B was evaluated on over 150 benchmark datasets and by humans against other leading foundation models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-4o, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which are closed-source models. While Llama 3.1 405B was outperformed on some benchmarks, the “experimental evaluation suggests that our flagship model is competitive” with the other leading models, Meta said.

The Llama models are used to power Meta’s AI chatbot, Meta AI, which is available on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Meta expanded access to Meta AI in Latin America and other countries on Tuesday, and announced it is offering the chatbot in seven new languages, including German and Hindi. Users have the option to use the Llama 3.1 405B-powered Meta AI on WhatsApp and meta.ai.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company expects “future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry,” and that Llama 3.1 405B is a step toward making open-source models the industry standard.

“AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life — and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research,” Zuckerberg said in a statement released Tuesday. “Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn’t concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society.”

Zuckerberg, who told Bloomberg the company is working on Llama 4, said he believes “open-source AI will be safer than the alternatives,” and that the company’s new model “will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source.”