Meta's Paid ChatGPT Competitor: A New Era in Conversational AI

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. In the cutthroat contest to build the most powerful artificial intelligence, one question remains. Should underlying code be held private or given away as open source?

0:40OpenAI, for instance, keeps the data of projects like ChatGPT under lock and key, obviously. And there's a lot of controversy around that, right? When OpenAI initially launched, the idea was to be an open source AI platform. But when big money came into play, eventually they transitioned into being a more closed source platform. You know, they received$10 billion from Microsoft and they couldn't just go away and give away all of their code for free. So in pretty stark contrast to the play OpenAI is doing, Meta has taken a more inclusive approach, opening up its language models or Lambda to researchers.

1:17and academics. However, change is starting to happen. The financial terms recently indicated that Meta is on the verge of launching a commercial variant of Llama and that businesses will be able to use this and tweak it and tailor it to their needs. This is a big piece of news because essentially up until this point, Meta has been really big in the AI space and been releasing a lot of research, a lot of open source projects, but they haven't really released a lot of, I mean, aside from the fact that they integrate AI into like their algorithms for recommendations on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, they haven't really been putting a lot of AI tools out there that are exclusively, you know, consumer or a customer or, you know, enterprise tools.

2:03So I think what's really interesting is the fact that they're now planning on making this play, which could close the gap between Google and, you know, OpenAI and themselves. So Yan Lakhan, which is Meta's VP and chief AI scientist, while talking to a different conference in July, speculated, quote, the competitive landscape of AI is going to be completely changed in the coming months, in the coming weeks, maybe, when there will be open source platforms that are actually as good as the ones that are not. Additionally, I think Meta is going to explore the creation of AI chatbots and be able to tailor them to specific user categories like individuals or business.

2:42I think open source models, though beneficial in many ways, do come with some, you know, drawbacks, opening up AI to a broader populace, some would argue could accelerate, you know, learning due to the influx of data, while also identifying bugs and security issues faster. However, some people also argue that these models could, you know, risk misuse by actors with, you know, less than noble intentions, which is a scenario that raises alarm bells for many within and outside the tech sphere. But to be honest, I think that like inevitably, here's what people are concerned about is, you know, North Korea, bad actors, different hackers all around the world are going to be using these tools to do all sorts of nefarious things.

3:32You know, clone voices, do deepfake videos, use them to auto chat with people as, you know, making like an auto chat that is using a cloned deepfake voice to scam old seniors out of their retirement savings and pension funds. And, you know, the same way that we're seeing people manually do it, but now they're going to be able to do it with an American accent instead of an Indian accent, as is the case with many, you know, scammer YouTube videos I've watched. So I think that it's going to be a little bit, it's going to be a little bit interesting to see where this goes. But at the end of the day, I believe it is important to have these open source platforms available.

4:16I think they're going to be a big counterweight to for-profit platforms like OpenAI and Google. And so I, for one, am in the camp of the open source models. And I understand that there's a lot of risks there. But I just think that at the end of the day, it will get there, right? Bad actors eventually will be able to develop these tools, in my opinion. And state actors, for sure, will be able to develop these tools. So like if we're talking about will North Korea ever get there if it wasn't open source, I think they would. So I think that I think inevitably if you open source that you give researchers, scientists and more of a broader audience the ability to play with these tools and use them and be able to build their own defenses.

5:05right? I think it's just as likely that if you open source one of these AI tools, you'd get way more people being able to work on the security side of it than if you had them closed sourced. And so I actually think that the security risk, while it does increase, I think that there's going to be counter counterweights that are built by people that have access to it. So I, for one, I'm kind of in the camp of building them. So I think initially meta plans to kind of grant free access to commercial versions of its AI models, but I think the strategy may evolve over time. Inside sources actually hinted that Meta might levy charges on enterprise customers looking to modify or customize their models in the future.

5:46LAMA, which is an acronym for large language model Meta AI, is Meta's open source AI that generates text, images, and code. So since its announcement back in February, LAMA has catered primarily to research and academics, but with the impending release of its commercial version, a wider demographic, including developers and businesses, I think are going to get the chance to innovate using this foundational model. So just for context, Llama is available in versions with 7, 13, 33, and 65 billion parameters. So this is contrasts with OpenAI's GPT-5, which has 175 billion parameters. And then GPT-4 has around 1.8 trillion parameters if the current leaks that have recently come out are correct.

6:34So at present, I think OpenAI is getting boosted by, you know, the heavy backing of Microsoft. They had their$10 billion invested there. And I think that that has marked a significant kind of, you know, explosion in the AI space. The, you know, Microsoft has integrated that into Bing search and image creator but and meanwhile i think google has its own you know chatbot bard and proprietary loms that are definitely closed source so well i think open source ai is you know not a new arena i think the commercial launch of the metas lma their llama is noteworthy giving it scale and the status of the tech giant behind it really meta is one of the biggest um players and developers in the AI space.

7:21They've been really at the forefront developing some really powerful tools since the beginning. They've been purchasing and working on these tools for a number of years. And it goes back almost as far as, you know, some of these, the projects Google's been working on. So it would not surprise me if Meta came out with a really big play. I think the only difference is they weren't, their core business wasn't threatened in the way Google's business was threatened by Microsoft's Bing integration. And so that's the only reason I think that they've taken longer to come out with a tool. I think if they were pushed to the limit in the way Google was, they would have already have come out with their commercial tool.

7:58So I think this move really puts Meta squarely in competition with the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and potentially was going to fuel some really rapid advancements in the AI sector. I think it's an interesting counterpoint to the criticism faced by closed source platforms like OpenAI and Google. And I think it's going to be interesting to kind of look at the security and transparency issues that are going to arise here. But all in all, this is going to be a really exciting and interesting space that I will be following along very interested.