Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. debuted a new and powerful AI model that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called “state of the art” and said will rival similar offerings from competitors like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The new model released Tuesday, called Llama 3.1, took several months to train and hundreds of millions of dollars of computing power. The company said it represents a major update from Llama 3, which came out in April. “I think the most important product for an AI assistant is going to be how smart it is,” Zuckerberg said during an interview on the Bloomberg Originals series The Circuit with Emily Chang. “The Llama models that we’re building are some of the most advanced in the world.” Meta is already working on Llama 4, Zuckerberg added. Meta executives say that the model, which is primarily used to power chatbots both within Meta and by outside developers, has a wide range of new capabilities, including improved reasoning to help solve complex math problems or instantly synthesize an entire book of text. It also has generative AI features that can create images on demand through text prompts. A feature called “Imagine Yourself” lets users upload an image of their face, which can then be used to create depictions of them in different scenes and scenarios. Meta uses its Llama models to power its AI chatbot, called Meta AI, which operates inside its apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, and also as a separate web product. Zuckerberg said that Meta has “hundreds of millions” of users for its chatbot, and expects it will be the most widely used chatbot in the world by the end of the year. He expects that others outside of Meta will use Llama to train their own AI models.

Full report : Meta debuts Llama 3.1 405B, the “first frontier-level open source AI model”, as well as new Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models, and says it’s working on Llama 4.