Meta’s Challenge to OpenAI—Give Away a Massive Language Model

At 175 billion parameters, it’s as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-3

Meta is giving away some of the family jewels: That’s the gist of an announcement from the company formerly known as Facebook this week. In a blog post on the Meta AI site, the company’s researchers announced that they’ve created a massive and powerful language AI system and are making it available free to all researchers in the artificial-intelligence community. Meta describes the move as an effort to democratize access to a powerful kind of AI—but some argue that not very many researchers will actually benefit from this largesse. And even as these models become more accessible to researchers, many questions remain about the path to commercial use.

In line with Meta AI’s commitment to open science, we are sharing Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT-175B), a language model with 175 billion parameters trained on publicly available data sets, to allow for more community engagement in understanding this foundational new technology. For the first time for a language technology system of this size, the release includes both the pretrained models and the code needed to train and use them. To maintain integrity and prevent misuse, we are releasing our model under a noncommercial license to focus on research use cases. Access to the model will be granted to academic researchers; those affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia; along with industry research laboratories around the world.

Read more @ IEEE Spectrum – by Eliza Strickland