Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a new artificial intelligence (AI) system intended to be as powerful as the most advanced model offered by OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) startup that created ChatGPT, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Meta aims for its new AI model, which it hopes to be ready next year, to be several times more powerful than the one it released just two months ago, called Llama 2.
The planned AI system would help other companies build services that produce sophisticated text, analysis, and other output. It is the work of a group formed early this year by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to accelerate the development of so-called generative AI tools that can produce humanlike expressions.
Meta expects to start training the new AI system, known as a large language model, in early 2024, the WSJ report also noted.
Plans for the new model are part of Zuckerberg’s effort to assert Meta as a major force in the AI world after it fell behind rivals. Competition in the area has sharply intensified this year, spawning divergent views on everything from which business models are best to how the technology should be regulated.
The company is currently building up the data centers necessary for the job and acquiring more H100s, the most advanced of the Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) chips used for such AI training. While Meta joined with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to make Llama 2 available on Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform Azure, it plans to train the new model on its own infrastructure.
Zuckerberg is pushing for the new model, like Meta’s earlier AI offerings, to be open-sourced and therefore available free for companies to build AI-powered tools.