The big open-source AI models are here.
With Meta’s long-anticipated Llama 3.1 hitting officially in late July, the company claims it’s the first open-source model that outperforms GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says open-source is the future, and that Meta will have the most widely used assistant by year’s end.
And it’s not the only one, with numerous large, open-source models hitting their stride in July and August 2024, such as Mistral’s Large 2, Athene-70b, Google’s Gemma 2, AI 21’s Jamba, o1-ai’s Yi and more.
Meanwhile, the big powers keep racing on. Nvidia’s earnings are expected after the bell Wednesday, with revenue projected up by some 110% again over the year, with its stock, as of this writing, up 160% for the year and 3000% over the past 5 years.
In this edition of our bi-monthly AI roundup we look at the open-source eruption and the debate around it, current consideration of some of the darker prospects around AI, check in on governance, and spotlight emerging AI trends for the months of July and August 2024.
Democratizing AI
Big AI spending continues to surge, as indicated in the numbers below, with predicted use cases by growth:
But the arrival of these new open-source AI models has brought democratized AI back to the forefront of conversation, starting with how you define it.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) gathered a panel of experts from across the field (including from Google, Meta, and Amazon) for its definition, including the requirements that to be truly open-source, an AI system must be freely avail