Meta, Microsoft Expand AI Partnership
Meta and Microsoft announced an expanded artificial intelligence (AI) partnership with the release of the new large language model (LLM), Llama 2, free for research and commercial use.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the news at the Microsoft Inspire event. It shows a growing sense of collaboration across the industry and an open approach to sharing technology.
“Meta and Microsoft share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits, and we are excited that Meta is taking an open approach with Llama 2,” Nadella wrote in a blog post. “We offer developers choice in the types of models they build on, supporting open and frontier models and are thrilled to be Meta’s preferred partner as they release their new version of Llama 2 to commercial customers for the first time.”
Meta noted its support for Microsoft Azure and Windows, and a growing partnership between the two companies. This version of Llama was trained on 40% more data then the first version.
Meta and Microsoft have been longtime partners on AI, beginning with a collaboration to integrate ONNX Runtime with PyTorch to create a great developer experience for PyTorch on Azure, and Meta’s choice of Azure as a cloud provider.
The inclusion of the Llama 2 models in Windows aims to help grow the operating system for developers to build AI experiences tailored for their customers’ needs. It also aims to unlock the ability to build using tools like Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), Windows terminal, Microsoft Visual Studio and VS Code.
Meta says it already has had more than 100,000 requests for access to the LLM, and the things achieved by building on top of it. Model weights and starting code for the pretrained model and conversational fine-tuned versions are being included.
The expansion of the model catalog with Llama 2 and Microsoft’s partnership with Meta is “a big step forward in achieving a responsible, open approach to AI,” Nadella wrote.
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