Meta might be known for its various social networking platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and its commitment to launch a metaverse but it also believes that the future of the internet and technology is in the field of artificial intelligence. Hence, following the lead of tech companies including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, it has also released its large language model called Large Language Model Meta AI or LLaMA in February 2023.
Explaining the Large Language Model Meta AI of Meta: A Look Into the Capabilities of LLaMA and How It is Different from Other Large Language Models
Features and Capabilities as a Large Language Model
LLaMA is a large language model based on the transformer neural network architecture and deep learning model. Meta positions it as a foundation model designed to help researchers advance their work in natural language processing and other related subfields of artificial intelligence. It is also not an actual AI system that a person can talk to or use for end-use applications. LLaMA is a research tool shared with the public to democratize access to relevant AI models.
Published reports explained that the size of this model is about 7 billion to 65 billion parameters. It was also trained in 1.4 trillion tokens that were drawn from public data sources such as webpages scraped by Common Crawl, open source repositories of source code from GitHub, multi-language Wikipedia articles from the Wikimedia Foundation, public domain books from the Project Gutenberg, the LaTeX source code for scientific papers uploaded to ArXiv, and questions and answers from Stack Exchange websites.
It is important to note that LLaMA is specifically a collection of models of different model sizes that range from 7 billion parameters to 65 billion parameters. Furthermore, because it is a foundational model, it can be modified to improve its training stability, fine-tuned for specific tasks, and used for the development and implementation of other language models and specific end-use natural language processing applications.
The model has been made available under a noncommercial license for research use cases. Stanford University released its open-source seven-billion-parameter large language model based on LLaMA called Alpaca. Test runs showed that the resulting Alpaca chatbot had a performance that was similar to ChatGPT from OpenAI and it even outperformed the more famous chatbot on different domains including email writing, social media, and general productivity.
Differentiation from other Large Language Models
LLaMA shares several similarities with Generative Pre-Trained Transformer or GPT models from OpenAI and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers or BERT model from Google. These large language models are based on the transformer neural network architecture and deep learning model. This means that they were trained in large datasets using the self-attention mechanism and they process individual parts of an input sequence to find relations, determine context, and generate the best possible output.
The size of LLaMA models is not as big as Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 4 or GPT-4 and other large language models. However, based on test results, it can have similar performance and capabilities at a minimal and manageable cost. The developers focused on increasing the performance of LLaMA by increasing the amount of training data used to train the model instead of increasing the number of parameters or its model size.
Increasing the amount of training data has enabled the developers to improve the capabilities of LLaMA to generalize new and unseen examples. This can lead to lead to better performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. The developers were also able to reduce the computational cost associated with using the model. They noted that most large language models are expensive, and most of the costs stem from the specific computational costs comming from running these models to make predictions or interferences.
The biggest advantage of LLaMA is that it is more practical for widespread applications. Furthermore, because it is an open-source foundational model, it is designed for further fine-tuning and performance improvements. However, because it has fewer parameters or a smaller model size, it might not be as powerful as models such as GPT-4. It might not be able to generate outputs that are as complex or sophisticated as other larger models.
