Microsoft And Meta Partners For Llama 2 AI Language Model

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a surprising partner for the commercial use of AIs with technology giant Meta. Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg presented Llama 2 together at the MS Inspire.

Open-source language model

Meta and Microsoft announced support for the Llama 2 family on Azure and Windows at Inspire. Llama 2 is the next generation of the Facebook Group’s open-source language model. Meta launched its language model called Llama (which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI) earlier this year.

Now follows Llama 2 a new variant, which is also free for research and commercial use. Microsoft is thus expanding its AI model catalog with another language model. However, the partnership with Microsoft is not exclusive – Llama 2 will also start for Amazon AWS and Hugging Face, among other things.

An open approach to AI

The partnership with Meta is described by Microsoft as a big step towards a “responsible, open approach to AI”. Llama 2 was launched to give developers and enterprises the ability to build generative AI-powered tools and experiences. Azure AI customers can test Llama 2 with their own sample data to see how it performs for their specific use case.

“Now Azure customers can easily and securely customize and deploy the 7B, 13B, and 70B parameter Llama 2 models on Azure, the platform for the most widely used Frontier and open models,” the announcement reads. Furthermore, Llama will be optimized for local execution under Windows.