Meta Says Monthly Usage of its Llama AI Models Has Grown 10x Since January

Just as OpenAI announced that ChatGPT had doubled its user base to 200 million weekly active users in a year, Meta wants the world to know that it’s the real leader in AI innovation. Yesterday, the company announced that its Llama ecosystem of open-source AI models is growing very fast.

“Monthly usage of Llama grew 10x from January to July 2024 for some of our largest cloud service providers,” the company said in a blog post yesterday. Meta also detailed that its Llama models are approaching 350 million downloads, with over 20 million downloads just in the last month.

In late July, Meta released Llama 3.1, its largest and most advanced open-source model. “We’ve grown the number of partners in our Llama early access program by 5x with Llama 3.1 and will do more to meet the surging demand from partners,” the company said yesterday.

In an open letter published alongside the release of Llama 3.1 in July, Mark Zuckerberg explained why Meta was, unlike its biggest competitors, committed to open-source AI. “A key difference between Meta and closed model providers is that selling access to AI models isn’t our business model,” Zuckerberg explained. “That means openly releasing Llama doesn’t undercut our revenue, sustainability, or ability to invest in research like it does for closed providers.”

This open-source approach seems to be working well for Meta as the interest from developers and companies appears to be real. Meta is also leveraging its Llama AI models to power Meta AI, its smart assistant that’s available across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and the web.

In a post on Threads yesterday, Zuckerberg pointed out that Meta AI has now crossed 400 million monthly active users and 185 million weekly active users. The latter number is slightly inferior to the 200 million people using OpenAI’s ChatGPT every week. Zuckerberg hinted that Meta AI could soon surpass it as Meta AI has yet to launch in the UK, the EU, and Brazil