Meta's AI model Llama sees 10x growth

Meta’s open source AI model Llama 3.1 saw a ten-fold increase in usage since 2023. Llama 3.1 released in July 2024, added support for eight languages, expanded the context length to 128k and also introduced the 405B model as the first frontier level open-source AI model services.

Llama models are approaching 350 million downloads to date and they were downloaded more than 20 million times in the last month alone, making Llama the leading open-source model family.

The open-source nature of Llama has fostered an ecosystem of developers who can innovate and build on-premises or through cloud services. Llama has partnered with major cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure, Google, AWS and others, which has significantly contributed to its growth and adoption.

Hosted Llama usage doubled from May to July 2024, the 405 variant gained the most traction among unique users in August. 

Llama is considered to be the second most used model among developers and the industry leaders in open-source AI, according to artificial analysis.

As per the official Meta website, tech companies like Accenture, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Shopify, Zoom have Llama into their operations. 

Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO of NVIDIA: “Llama has profoundly impacted the advancement of state-of-the-art AI. The floodgates are now open for every enterprise and industry to build and deploy custom Llama supermodels using NVIDIA AI Foundry, which offers the broadest support for Llama 3.1 models across training, optimization, and inference. It’s incredible to witness the rapid pace of adoption in just the past month.”

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, AI and Data, AWS: “Customers want access to the latest state-of-the-art models for building AI applications in the cloud, which is why we were the first to offer Llama 2 as a managed API and have continued to work closely with Meta as they released new models. We’ve been excited to see the uptake for Llama 3.1 from customers across both Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, and we look forward to seeing how customers use this model to solve their most complex use cases.”

In his open letter to the world which talked about the benefits of Llama, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "When you consider the opportunities ahead, remember that most of today’s leading tech companies and scientific research are built on open-source software. The next generation of companies and research will use open-source AI if we collectively invest in it. That includes startups just getting off the ground as well as people in universities and countries that may not have the resources to develop their own state-of-the-art AI from scratch.

The bottom line is that open source AI represents the world’s best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone."