AI race: Alibaba, Tencent quickly adopt Meta’s new Llama 3.1 model amid excitement
Alibaba Cloud, the e-commerce giant’s online computing platform, was among the first to include the latest open-source Llama family of large language models (LLMs) – the technology underpinning generative AI products such as ChatGPT – by integrating it into its Bailian model training platform, the company said on Tuesday in a post published to its official WeChat account. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Alibaba said it is offering one month of free compute resources that can be used for training and inferencing tasks with Llama 3.1, which launched on Monday.
Shenzhen-based video gaming giant Tencent quickly followed with its own announcement the same day, saying Llama 3.1 is now available on its cloud platform. It includes a number of fine-tuning and inferencing tweaks to ensure Meta’s open source models are usable in a range of areas, from intelligent conversation, text generation and writing tasks, according to the company.
Meta is offering the latest version of Llama in three different sizes – 8B, 70B and 450B – that are named after the billions of parameters they include. The number of parameters generally corresponds with an LLM’s level of sophistication.
In its unveiling, Meta hailed Llama 3.1 as “the first frontier-level open-source AI model”. Early tests have compared it favourably with leading closed-source models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
“Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult,” he said.
LMSYS, an AI model research organisation supported by the University of California, Berkeley, currently ranks closed-source models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google as the top as the best performing. OpenAI’s GPT-4o ranks No 1, with the three companies’ other models filling out most of the other top 10 spots.
