Facebook Owner Meta Gives AI Community Access to Large Language Model

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc has expanded access to a large language model to include the artificial intelligence (AI) community to aid in research, the company announced on Tuesday (May 3).

Meta’s model is the first 175-billion-parameter language model to be made available to the broader AI research community, the social media company said in a blog post.

“Large language models” are natural language processing systems that are trained on massive volumes of text and can answer reading comprehension questions or generate new text, Reuters noted in a report.

Meta said the release of its Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B) model would “improve researchers’ abilities to understand how large language models work,” according to the report. Restrictions on access to such models had been “hindering progress on efforts to improve their robustness and mitigate known issues such as bias and toxicity,” per the blog post.

Artificial intelligence technology is increasingly being used in research and development for several major online platforms, although some researchers have concerns about the harms that can be spread through large language models, including perpetuating humans’ societal biases about race, gender and other distinguishing characteristics.

Meta “hoped to increase the diversity of voices defining the ethical considerations of such technologies,” it said in the blog post. The company released the model under a noncommercial license to focus on research use cases to “maintain integrity.”

Meta will grant access to the model to academic researchers and people affiliated with government, civil society and academic organizations as well as industry research laboratories, the report said. The release will include the pretrained models and the code to train and use them.

Related: Healthcare Automation Startup Syllable Secures $40M

In April, healthcare automation startup Syllable raised $40 million in a Series C funding round to boost patient experience with intelligent voice solutions for health system call centers and healthcare offices.

Growth equity firm TCV led Syllable’s fundraising effort, with participation from existing investors Oak HC/FT, Section32, and Verily. The fresh capital will be used by Syllable to further develop its central product, the Syllable Patient Assistant.