Meta AI has fresh LLM support via Llama 3.1 405B and it can now speak in more languages and create stylised selfies. Meta has not disclosed the cost of developing Llama 3.1 but CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that his company is spending billions on AI development.

The AI-powered assistant across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the web, is now available in 22 countries. You can also interact with Meta AI in new languages: French, German, Hindi, Hindi-Romanised Script, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish with more to come.

Llama 3.1 is the largest-ever open-source AI model, which Meta claims to outperform GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. Zuckerberg predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of the year, surpassing ChatGPT.

The company claims that Llama 405B’s improved reasoning capabilities make it possible for Meta AI to understand and answer “more complex questions, especially on the topics of math and coding”. It means you will be able to get more help on your math homework with step-by-step explanations and feedback, write code faster with debugging support and optimisation suggestions, and master complex technical and scientific concepts with expert instruction.

open-source AI

Zuckerberg has also posted an open letter in which he compared Llama to the open-source Linux operating system. Linux, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, didn’t find too many takers among big companies that were invested in closed alternatives but today Linux is widely used in Cloud computing.

“Today, Linux is the industry standard foundation for both cloud computing and the operating systems that run most mobile devices – and we all benefit from superior products because of it,” Zuckerberg has said in an open letter.

He said, last year Llama 2 was “only comparable to an older generation of models behind the frontier”. This year, “Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models and leading in some areas” and starting next year, “we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry”.

Big scores

The new version of Llama has 405 billion parameters or tweakable elements; it was trained with over 16,000 of Nvidia’s ultra-expensive H100 GPUs. The company has already offered two smaller versions of Llama 3, one with 70 billion parameters and another with eight billion.

New tool

Meta is also rolling out a beta tool called ‘Imagine me’ throughout the US, which allows prompts such as “Imagine me surfing” or “Imagine me as a surrealist painting”. The AI assistant can create these using a photo of the individual. Next month, there will be an “Edit with AI” button for fine-tuning images.