Meta plans to release its most powerful AI language model to date, the Llama 3 400B, by the end of July 2024 and will remain open source.

The Information first reported that this long-awaited launch comes just a few months after Meta announced its Llama 3 family of AI models in April, and that Llama 3 has already been used by Google's Gemma and Anthropic's Claude outperforming competitors like Sonnet with initial 8B and 70B parameter sizes.

The Llama 3 400B model is a game changer, boasting over 400 billion parameters and achieving near parity with OpenAI's GPT-4 on the MMLU benchmark, despite using less than half the parameters.

This impressive feat suggests that Meta has made significant strides in model architecture and training efficiency, and could rival the performance of GPT-4 and Claude Opus.

So how does the release of Meta's latest LLM model affect you? Let's talk.

Meta has been hinting at the release of the 400B model since April, promising new features such as multimodality, multilingual conversations, longer context windows, and stronger overall performance. No official release date was announced, but the Llama 3-405B option was recently released for WhatsApp Beta users on Android 2.24.14.7, leading to speculation of an imminent launch.

According to The Information, Meta will release the largest size Llama with weights on July 23. The article does not reveal any sources beyond that it is an employee of the company, but Meta's confirmation has created quite a buzz in the AI community as researchers and developers eagerly await the opportunity to utilize this powerful tool for their projects.

Applications for the Llama 3 400B range from advanced chatbots and virtual assistants to content generation and language translation. With its open availability and impressive performance, this model has the potential to democratize access to state-of-the-art linguistic AI by opening it up to a wider audience at a much lower cost.

The Llama 3 400B model is particularly exciting because it approaches the performance of OpenAI's GPT-4o (Omni) model, despite using less than half the parameters. However, apart from the potential benefits to cost and energy efficiency, there is another important advantage.

One of the most attractive aspects of Llama 3 is its open license for research and commercial use; if the 400B model is released under the same open license, access to state-of-the-art language features will be democratized, allowing researchers and developers to use this powerful tool without resorting to expensive proprietary APIs This will allow researchers and developers to utilize this powerful tool for their projects without having to rely on expensive proprietary APIs.

However, there are several uncertainties surrounding the release of the Llama 3 400B model. A recent tweet from prominent AI leaker “Jimmy Apples” suggests that Meta may not open source the weights of the 400B model. This claim should be taken with a grain of salt, as it contradicts past statements by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but raises questions about the future accessibility of this model.