This Week's Most Read: Meta’s Llama 2, Google Bard Updates

1. Meta Offers Companies Free Use of Llama 2 Language Model

Meta has unveiled the latest version of its popular language model, Llama. Dubbed Llama 2, the model is now free for businesses to adopt and customize.

Llama 2 comes in three model sizes and is open source, meaning it’s available for research and commercial use. Also available are versions focused on chat applications.

Users can request access here; the model is also available via Hugging Face. Alternatively, Llama 2 can be accessed through its "preferred" partner, Microsoft, according to a Facebook post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Llama 2 was trained on 40% more data than the first version, with double the context length.

The previous iteration of Llama (or LLaMA), released in February, powered some of the most popular open source models and applications, including Alpaca, HuggingChat and Gorilla. It’s designed to act as a base for wider models, with companies able to fine-tune atop it with proprietary data.

2. Google’s Bard Adds Support for Images, New Languages

Google has expanded the capabilities of its AI chatbot Bard to make it more practical for business uses.

Bard is now available across Europe and Brazil. It also now supports more than 40 languages including Arabic, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), German, Hindi and Spanish. Previously, Bard only supported English, Japanese and Korean.

Users can upload jpegs, PNGs and Webp files to Bard. The chatbot can generate information on images as well as create ideas for captions.

Users can also now pin conversations, rename them and have multiple conversations going at once.

Bard chats can now be shared via links; it can also export generated code to the software development platform Replit as well as Google Colab.

3. AI Text-Generation Models and Apps: Everything You Need to Know

AI Business’ definitive list of text-generation models.

We explore how text-generation models work and lists some of the most important models and applications available today.

4. Microsoft Rolls Out Bing Chat, Copilot for Enterprises − At a Cost

Microsoft this week launched enterprise-grade versions of its AI-powered Bing Chat and AI assistant Copilot for its 365 suite of applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

But Copilot also will raise a company’s Microsoft 365 costs by up to 240% - it is priced at $30 per user per month. Currently, Microsoft 365 business accounts start at $12.50 and go up to $57 per user per month.

Copilot's pricing "seems high" compared to the Teams Premium offering of $10 per user per month, according to a research note from BofA Securities analysts provided to AI Business. Teams Premium offers an intelligent recap of meetings, live translations for captions, personalized call timeline markers, meeting templates and other uses.

Bing Chat is free to current Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium subscribers, but a stand-alone offering is coming for $5 per user per month.

5. No More Stick Figures: Stability AI's Doodle-to-Image Generator

Stability AI, one of the developers of text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, has unveiled Stable Doodle, a generative AI model that turns one's rough sketches into fully-fledged images.

Draw something, enter a prompt, choose a style and see it generate three versions of the image. Pick an image to download in high definition.

Inputs can be sketches that artists can turn into renderings for work. Or it could be a rough sketch by casual users for use in personal projects. For now, users have to draw using an online tool.

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