Meta’s LLaMA has likely influenced OpenAI to create an open-source LLM to win the market share war.
In a surprising move, OpenAI is going back to its roots and planning to launch an open-source LLM. This is likely due to mounting pressure from other open-source LLMs that are becoming competent and pose a great threat of eating into ChatGPT’s market.
This is a significant development. The AI revolution poster boy, ChatGPT, is currently running GPT-4. It’s a very powerful LLM but closed-sourced, owned entirely by OpenAI’s stakeholders.
OpenAI’s move to release an open-source model can be construed as an effort to compete with players such as Meta, which released a powerful open-source model called Large Language Model Meta AI or LLaMA back in February. LLaMA is being used extensively for a variety of purposes, and some areas are quite important for OpenAI (and Google too, most likely) or any LLM to learn and grow. Extensive usage is instrumental to the success of any LLM right now.
It’s important to note that the company maintains that this new open-source LLM will not compete with ChatGPT. How is that possible remains to be seen—Most likely the new model will not be as powerful as ChatGPT’s latest version.
Whatever the reason is, this is welcome news for AI enthusiasts and experts are hailing this move as it principally aims to make AI technology more accessible than before.
Meta’s LLaMA, now with the help of OpenAI’s open-source LLM, can now influence Google to work on the open-source front.
OpenAI has recently raised $300 million in funding which is separate from Microsoft’s cash infusion earlier this year.
Microsoft is also increasing GPT-4’s exposure by integrating it into existing IPs that the company owns, such as Word and Bing. On the other hand, Google has gone big on AI too and has integrated its own closed-source LLM called the PaLM 2 into search, email, and workspace tools apart from the ChatGPT-competitor Bard.
The leak was revealed by The Information. It has been pretty much confirmed now. Link: Open-Source AI Is Gaining on Google and ChatGPT by Jon Victor (paywalled)
