The arms race between technology companies on AI models has intensified significantly in the past 2 weeks. Just before Google announced many improvements to Gemini, OpenAI revealed GPT-4o. Following that, Microsoft announced a lot of Copilot+ PCs, along with its own AI improvements.

But while everything was happening, Meta was taking care of its own AI business. The company has quietly published a research paper on its efforts in the multimodal AI space. A paper discovered by Venture Beat shows that Meta is working on a multimodal large language model called chameleon.

This should not be confused with the generated AI model Cm3Leon (pronounced chameleon) that meta AI revealed last summer. Meta AI states in a blog post that the Cm3Leon model will lead to future Llm improvements. 

The research paper argues that chameleons are state-of-the-art and win or compete equally with other models like Gemini, GPT-4 and Meta's own Llama-2.  Like Google's Gemini, Chameleon is built on an "early fusion token-based mixed modal" architecture. This means that the model was built to learn from the beginning from a combination of images, code, text, and other inputs, and it uses that content to create a sequence.

Another way to build a multimodal architecture is to sew together several models trained in a single modality. This is called "late fusion.""Essentially, AI systems take individual models and fuse them to make inferences. Late fusion obviously works well, but it may have limited AI's ability to integrate information.

In this paper, the author states that Chameleon is most similar to Google's Gemini, which was built in a similar way. But unlike Gemini, researchers say the chameleon is an end-to-end model. 

If the paper's claims and tests are true and can be replicated, the Chameleon model appears to match or exceed the many AI models available today.

An interesting wrinkle to the claims made about Chameleon is that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have been pushing open source as the future for much of this year. And it is. The existing Lama 3 is open source and is expected to receive a big update in May. Meta also just released the Quest headset operating system to the hardware manufacturer

This paper does not indicate whether or when Meta will release this new model. Publicly, Meta has been working hard on the latest iteration of the Lama Assistant. Facebook Instagrammer 3 just went live on Facebook, Instagrammer and WhatsApp in late May 4.Instagrammer is a free app that allows you to share your videos and videos with your instagrammer Instagrammer Instagrammer Instagrammer Instagrammer Instagram.