Meta brings in "most intelligent" AI assistant for free

Meta announced a new open-source 'Llama' language model that powers an enhanced AI assistant. It asserted that the new AI is quicker and wiser because it is built on Llama 3. According to Mark Zuckerberg, it's the "most intelligent" AI assistant that is offered for free. Because Llama 3 is open-source, developers can modify it, and Meta will include such enhancements into upcoming releases.

"The bottom line is we believe Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use," Meta Co-Founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Instagram.

Meta said, “We're excited about the potential that generative AI technology can have for people who use Meta products and for the broader ecosystem. We also want to make sure we're developing and releasing this technology in a way that anticipates and works to reduce risk. We conducted both automated and manual evaluations to understand our models' performance in a series of risk areas like weapons, cyberattacks, and child exploitation "

That effort includes incorporating protections in the way Meta designs and releases Llama models and being cautious when it eventually adds generative AI features to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

AI models, Meta's included, have been known to occasionally go off the rails, giving inaccurate or bizarre responses in episodes referred to as "hallucinations".

Meta AI has been consistently updated and improved since its initial release last year. Meta cited the example of refining the way its AI answers prompts regarding political or social issues to summarize relevant points about the topic instead of offering a single point of view. Llama 3 has been tuned to better discern whether prompts are innocuous or out-of-bounds.

"Large language models tend to overgeneralize, and we don't intend for it to refuse to answer prompts like 'How do I kill a computer program?' even though we don't want it to respond to prompts like 'How do I kill my neighbor?'," Meta explained.

Meta said it lets users know when they are interacting with AI on its platform and puts visible markers on photorealistic images that were in fact generated by AI. Beginning in May, Meta will start labeling video, audio, and images "Made with AI" when it detects or is told content is generated by the technology. Llama 3, for now, is based in English but in the coming months Meta will release more capable models able to converse in multiple languages.