Apr 2024
LLaMA 3 — Meta Distributes AI to Billions via Social Platforms
Meta released LLaMA 3 in 8B and 70B parameter sizes, with the 70B model matching or exceeding GPT-3.5 Turbo on most benchmarks while remaining fully open for download. Simultaneously, Meta launched Meta AI, a consumer assistant powered by LLaMA 3, integrated natively into WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook search — making a frontier-class model available to billions of users without requiring any separate sign-up.
Why it mattersDistributing frontier-quality weights through Meta's social platforms meant billions of users could interact with capable open models, accelerating consumer-facing AI adoption globally.
Try itIn retrospect, the pattern to notice is that LLaMA 3 70B Instruct became the default open-weight baseline for evaluating whether a proprietary API's premium was justified on a given task.