The LLM Arms Race Keeps Forging Ahead
Claude3. ChatGPT. Grok. Gemini.
We are watching a very interesting race between different companies in the large language model (LLM) race. Most of your major technology companies are involved, with others lurking in the background.
These models are being created by the likes of Google, X.ai, and OpenAi. Then we have Amazon getting involved with a $4 billion investment in Anthropic. Microsoft is heavily tied to OpenAI.
And let us not forget Apple who hasn't fully released to the world what it is doing. That said, we cannot presume they are sitting idly by.
This leaves us with the last participant, and the one who made the latest move.
Llama3 Released And Tops The Rest
Earlier, Meta released Llama3, the latest update of its LLM. Based upon reviews, it pushed them to the front of the class.
This was accompanied by the release of a web interface, ai.meta.com.
Here are the specs from the blog post:
In going through some of the reviews, many had a great deal of success with the initial trials of the application. Personally, I messed around with the image generation.
Here are a couple Threads created using Llama3:
https://inleo.io/threads/view/taskmaster4450le/re-leothreads-exrfhrut
https://inleo.io/threads/view/taskmaster4450le/re-leothreads-swmcpbph
As we can see, Llama3 places a watermark on the image. This will help to keep people from trying to pass off these images as real.
One positive about what Meta is doing is this is open source. Many models are closed which means we need to have a counterbalance. Also, Meta appears to be opening everything. Some claim to be open source yet only open the weights.
This Week's Leader
Meta jumped in the lead for nOW.
Lurking in the background is Grok 2.0 from X.Ai and, of course, ChatGPT5, which many feel will blow the competition away when it is released.
Then we have Google which is one of the leaders in data and, likely, compute.
The key here is how quickly the ranking changes. Meta's lead will last up to the point that someone else releases an update. Whomever that is will jump to the front of the line.
It is how this is shaping up.
We could have someone else who is ahead come next week. There are so many players involved with high stakes.
Who Do You Trust?
Zuckerberg is not a well liked individual and for good reason. For many, he is pure evil. That said, in this instance, he is making some sense.
His view is that open source is the only way to go. While many claim that this technology is too powerful to have in the open since a nefarious actor could use it, the counterclaim is it might be too powerful to have in the hands of one entity.
If this is the path to AGI (or even ASI), which is hotly debated, is there any single entity, whether company or government, you trust, with this?
I think most would agree that is not a single entity. If this does indeed have the potential to end humanity, than we do not want Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, or the nutcases at the NSA in full control of this without an opportunity to counterbalance it.
That is what open source does.
Race To The Bottom
I will be going deeper into this in another article.
However, what we are watching is a race to the bottom. When it comes to LLMs, there is going to be no value. The money is going to reside, from this perspective, with the applications.
In other words, these LLMs are becoming commoditized.
Over time, as they get more advanced, few will need to be cutting edge. Most will suffice for the majority of use cases.
Another factor is going to be the the prices.
Right NOW, Meta is offering Llama3 for free. This could change. Nevertheless, if it is offering this much capability for zero cost to the user, why would most pay for other chatbots? Certainly there might be some specific use cases but the majority will find this to be enough.
None of this means it is a worthless pursuit. This is a high stakes game for these companies. The point is the monetization might not be as straight forward as it appears. Having 500 million people paying for chatbots is not the future.
Instead, we should focus upon what they are integrated into. Here is where the real money is going to come from.
For now, we can enjoy the race because it is advancing at a rapid pace.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
I’m surprised but cautiously optimistic about the open source aspect coming from meta. That was not something I expected to happen but certainly appreciate. It is interesting to see them playing musical chairs with the front running spot. I think it’s crucial that we have many companies competing, but at the same time I feel like there’s another shoe to drop.
Nice tech I got to say, Mark has done a great job getting a lot of people attention and is improving his quality and quantity of interactions on all 3 platforms it's a nice game, can't wait for Chatgpt to come on board again.
As we've seen, the leader can change in just a blink of an eye. I think in the early parts, there will be leaders and laggards. But since most of them will be using similar data, I think there will come a point where they will all be almost equal. What would eventually put one up over the others will be the new data that will be hidden from the others. A lot of companies are starting to setup and position themselves to sell their data. Reddit kind of initiated it, and I'm hearing Discord data will be too.
Meta has a large user base across their platforms and I've read that they will be integrating the chatbot into these platforms for users to try out for free. In a way, it seems too good to be true but I guess the plan might be to put it at the fingertips of as many people as possible first before making financial gains from this invention.
Yes I believe it is already in the applications.
Meta is positioning itself nicely.