Meta Platforms is working on a new artificial intelligence system that should be as powerful as OpenAI’s most advanced model, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Facebook parent company aims to have its new AI model ready next year, the Journal said, adding that it will be several times more powerful than the commercial version called Llama 2.
Llama 2 is Meta’s open source AI language model that launched in July and is distributed by Microsoft’s cloud Azure services to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
The planned system, details of which could still change, would help other companies build services that produce advanced text, analytics and other output, the newspaper reported.
Meta expects to start training the new AI system, known as a large language model, in early 2024, the report said.
Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Businesses and enterprises have been flocking to the emerging generative AI market for newer capabilities and refining business processes since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year.
Bloomberg News reported in July that Apple is working on AI offerings similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, adding that it has built its own framework, known as “Ajax,” to create large language models and is also testing what some engineers call a chatbot ‘Apple GPT’.
In August, Meta released an AI model that can translate and transcribe speech in dozens of languages, a potential building block for tools that enable real-time communication across language differences.
The company said in a blog post that its SeamlessM4T model could support text-to-speech translations in nearly 100 languages, as well as full speech-to-speech translation for 35 languages, combining technology previously only available in separate models.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
