Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT.
Llama 3.1 is significantly more complex than the smaller Llama 3 models that came out a few months ago. The largest version has 405 billion parameters and was trained with over 16,000 of Nvidia’s ultraexpensive H100 GPUs. Meta isn’t disclosing the cost of developing Llama 3.1, but based on the cost of the Nvidia chips alone, it’s safe to guess it was hundreds of millions of dollars.