Meta Releases Latest AI Model, Adds Free Chatbot to Platforms

Facts

Meta unveiled on Thursday the first two versions of its Llama 3 large language model (LLM), which the company claims can outperform much larger models including Google's trillion-parameter Gemini Pro.¹
The just-launched versions of the model were built with 8B and 70B parameters, a measure that indicates how much data the system is trained on. A bigger 400B-parameter model has yet to be rolled out.²
This comes as several companies, including startups and established tech giants, have entered the artificial intelligence (AI) race since OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022.³
Llama 3 has been used to upgrade the company's smart assistant software Meta AI, which began to be incorporated across its platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp — on Thursday.⁴
Meta AI is now available in English in more than a dozen countries outside of the US, such as Australia, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, and South Africa.⁵
The chatbot has recently encountered issues with its responses, claiming to have a child that attends a real — and very specific — public school for the gifted and talented in a parenting group and refusing to generate images of an Asian man with a white woman.⁶

Narrative A, as provided by Aibusiness. As Meta has begun to launch its Llama 3-powered chatbot across apps, users will now be able to ask for restaurant recommendations and access real-time information without having to bounce to a separate page. Additionally, high-quality generated images — and gifs — will be available for free, featuring a watermark label to prevent deep fakes.
Narrative B, as provided by Washington Post. Given that Meta's social media platforms have long been fertile ground for misinformation and extremist content, the introduction of a chatbot can only aggravate that issue due to its tendency for 'hallucinations' and false responses. It's not because a technology is new that its potential harm has to be accepted.