- Ben's Bites
- Posts
- Daily Digest: Wild llamas set free.
Daily Digest: Wild llamas set free.
PLUS: The return of fine tuning.
Subscribe | Ben’s Bites Pro | Ben’s Bites News
Daily Digest #462
Want to get in front of 100k AI enthusiasts? Work with us here
Hello folks, here’s what we have today;
PICKS
New tutorial picks:
Create a daily personalised industry news podcast with AI. Turn your favourite industry news into a daily audio podcast delivered to your inbox.
Meta puts open-source AI on the podium. Llama 3.1 series of models came out yesterday with 3 new models—Llama 3.1 8B, 70B and 405B. While the 405B version is not the best model out there, open-source is now on the podium with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Another surprise: Meta’s technical report is the bible for LLM training.🍿Our Summary (also below)
You can now fine-tune GPT-4o-mini—and do it for free for the next 2 months. OpenAI wants you to customize its shorty but smarty model to your tasks. It is allowing free training up to 2M tokens every day till Sep 23rd. The war between Llama fine-tunes and GPT fine-tunes is ON.
AI as it should be: effortless, powerful, and private - Unlock the real value of AI with local, ownable, and customizable models that you control. Trained on your data. Built for your business. Completely private and scalable.
Integrate, customize, and deploy AI seamlessly
Quickly connect components, assign workloads, and deploy
Leverage existing infrastructure to scale AI applications
Get Early Access (sponsor)
NEW TUTORIALS
Create memes, comics, and characters. Use Glif and create shareable visual content from prompts.
Create influencer marketing strategies. Use ChatGPT to find influencers, make outreach strategies, and set clear guidelines.
Develop customer journey maps. Go from persona to action plans with ChatGPT.
Auto-generate meeting prep summaries. Use Lindy to enter any meeting prepared.
Conducting product viability analysis. Assess the feasibility and potential success of new product ideas.
Generate case studies for clients. Use Claude to create a bot that generates custom case studies.
Crafting an effective creative brief with ChatGPT. Align design teams with campaign goals with powerful briefs.
Write a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Write a legally sound NDA to keep your company information private.
TOP TOOLS
AssemblyAI* - Multilingual Speech-to-Text API with Near-Human Accuracy
Zerox by Omni AI - Zero shot pdf OCR with GPT-4o-mini.
DOM-to-semantic-markdown - Convert HTML DOM to semantic markdown for use in LLMs.
LlamaTutor - Explain any subject at any education level.
ICML by Exa - Search through ICML 2024 papers using Exa’s neural search.
Stems by Suno - Separate the vocals and instrumentals from AI-generated songs for better control.
Speech to Note - Turn your voice into written notes.
View more →
*sponsored
EXPERT WORKSHOPS
How to build AI agents to automate your work (30th July)
Automating work and streamlining productivity with Gumloop (6th Aug)
How to repurpose content using AI (7th Aug)
Build an AI sales assistant with Google Sheets and Slack (13th Aug)
AI for holding companies: sales, content creation & more (20th Aug)
Automating business workflows with Lindy AI agents (21st Aug)
NEWS
Gumloop AI raises $3.1M seed led by First Round.
Harvey AI raises $100M series C at a $1.5B valuation.
A day after raising $500 million, AI startup Cohere laid off about 20 employees.
AI is already taking jobs in the video game industry.
OpenAI reassigns the leader of its Preparedness team to another “bigger” project.
How Elicit evaluates LLM outputs - The tradeoffs between trust, scale, and flexibility.
Unclassifieds - short, sponsored links
Job Boardly - Launch your next online business, fast. Create & monetize a niche job board instantly.
QUICK BITES
405 billion parameters. 15 trillion tokens. 16,000 GPUs. That’s how Mark Zuckerberg plans to take on closed AI companies. His latest move is a herd of new Llama models—Llama 3.1 8B, 70B and 405B.
Here’s what you are getting in the package:
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/55af497a-a242-434e-b146-b57c22c5a3c8/image.png?t=1721818593)
Llama 3.1 405B (+ new 8B and 70B versions)
Llama 3.1 405B is the biggest Llama of them all. Using it as a teacher, Meta has retrained its 8B and 70B versions too. Together these models:
have a context window of 128k tokens. This means you can enter hundreds of pages worth of content in your prompts.
are multilingual in 8 languages—English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai.
come with support for using tools like Web Search, Math Reasoning, and Code Execution.
are open source. You can download the weights and use them in your applications.
Llama 3.1 models are not multimodal. They don’t understand or create images. But multimodal Llamas are coming soon.
Benchmarks
Not only Llama 3.1 405B is the smartest LLM ever released openly, it also humbles the closed giants. Its benchmark scores near (and sometimes top) GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/c340c9bd-a232-4d3d-b248-4f15aed5ab01/image.png?t=1721805084)
To cover benchmarks in a snap, look at how it does at Scale AI’s SEAL leaderboard:
2nd in math and reasoning.
4th in coding.
1st in following instructions.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/a346d11c-deb6-4abf-8a74-1a6f2040ebb0/image.png?t=1721804540)
Its exact performance will depend on where you want to use it but it’ll fall in the same category as the top closed LLMs.
The smaller versions of the Llama 3.1 family also perform better than the corresponding Llama 3 versions. These models are state-of-the-art in their categories with the same powers: have a larger context window, are multilingual and support tool use.
Open Science
The model weights are open. You can download them from Meta’s website here or from HuggingFace. In addition, Meta is working with other providers such as data lakes (Databricks and Snowflake), major cloud providers ( Google Cloud, AWS, Azure) and startups in the ecosystem (Groq, Ollama, Fireworks etc.)
Meta has also updated its license and now allows using Llama 3.1 405B to create synthetic data for training other models. This was one of the key requests from the community.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/ca4275f7-6828-4019-bba6-515d47a27a51/image.png?t=1721820786)
Although nothing is truly open-source in AI, this launch is more than just open weights. Meta has released a massive technical report outlining what are the challenges they faced building a model of this size and how they overcame them.
The amount of research they have shared in it is insane. You can read the paper here and listen to the Latent Space podcast with Thomas Scialom (Llama 2 lead and Llama 3 post-training lead) for more technical details.
The interesting part is using the 405B version which you can’t run on consumer hardware (your MacBook or single GPU). Many of the inference/fine-tuning providers are giving access to the model on Day 1.
Fireworks AI has the best pricing $3/$3 for input/output for a million tokens. For the 8B and 70B versions, Octo AI and Together AI have the best pricing right now.
But that’s for developers, where can the rest of the world use these models? The answer is:
Meta AI
Meta isn't just releasing powerful models for developers, it is integrating them directly into meta.ai. Users of Meta’s AI chatbot will now have access to Llama 3.1 405B.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/e45c6172-6592-4025-9ea2-2ac251842dfa/image.png?t=1721820814)
Zuck’s BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is to have Meta AI be the most used AI chatbot in the world by the end of the year. He says it will get there before that. More changes are coming to Meta AI, some highlights:
Meta AI is now available in 22 countries, including new additions in Latin America & Cameroon and supports 7 new languages.
"Imagine me" feature creates personalized images based on text prompts and your selfies (e.g., "Imagine me as a superhero"). This uses other research from Meta (not Llama) to make it possible.
Coming to Meta Quest (VR) next month, replacing Voice Commands. Already available on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
While the models are released everywhere today, these might take some time and will be released gradually in various countries and regions.
Zuck’s vision for AI (and open-source)
Zuck also laid out his vision in a detailed letter, claiming “Open Source AI is the path forward”. He also did an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang. Combining the snippets from both here:
AI will follow the Linux model, where open-source eventually outpaces closed systems in capabilities and adoption—and Meta will lead it. There will be tons of AI models—small and large, not a single AI god.
In his playbook, Meta will not make money by selling access to the models, but create products that use these AI models. At the same time, he doesn’t want to rely on others for access to the platform (like Apple in mobile phones).
People are using Meta AI to roleplay difficult social situations. Creators (businesses) want to use AI to be in touch with their fans (customers) on Meta’s social apps. Agents with Llama 4 are Meta’s opportunity.
Open innovation is key to staying ahead of competitors like China (not centralized progress). The US can maintain a healthy 6-8 months lead with open AI models and it would be better than hoping that model weights of closed AI models remain secret.
Ben’s Bites Insights
We have 2 databases that are updated daily which you can access by sharing Ben’s Bites using the link below;
All 10k+ links we’ve covered, easily filterable (1 referral)
6k+ AI company funding rounds from Jan 2022, including investors, amounts, stage etc (3 referrals)
Reply