Meta to release GPT-4 competition as open-source model next year

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly sticking to the open-source strategy of making the Llama models available for free for many, though not all, use cases - including commercial ones - despite the performance increase.

The release of the new model is said to be part of Zuckerberg's strategy to reposition Meta as a leading AI company. However, Google should have released Gemini by then, and OpenAI is also expected to release more innovations by next year - though probably not GPT-5.

WSJ confirms rumors about Llama 3

The Wall Street Journal report coincides with statements made by OpenAI engineer Jason Wei. He reported in late August about a group meeting with Meta AI developers who claimed to have enough computing power to train Llama 3 and 4. Llama 3 is expected to reach the level of GPT-4 but will remain open source.

Llama 2 reaches the level of GPT-3.5 in some applications and is also being optimized by the open-source community through fine-tuning and additional applications. Reaching the level of GPT-4 is likely to be much more challenging, as the current OpenAI model is based on a more complex architecture of 16 expert networks with about 111 billion parameters each.

This may explain why Meta's goal with an open-source approach is not to surpass GPT-4, but only to be somewhat on par with GPT-4. Distributing a model with the complexity of GPT-4 could be much more difficult.