10/28/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 10/28/2024 12:40
This blog was provided by our partners at Meta.
Over the last two years, generative AI and the foundation models that power it have given us a glimpse into the significant economic and social benefits that lie ahead. From scientific discoveries to education to energy efficiency, the use cases seem boundless.
Canada has long been a leader in AI, but the enormous resources and compute needed to keep up with the cutting edge of generative AI model development makes for a compelling case that a made-in-Canada approach requires strong public-private partnerships based on open-source technologies that are free to use, highly customizable, and safe and secure for deployment.
Unlike proprietary AI models like Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, where applications can be built on top of APIs but access to the underlying model are restricted, an open-source approach to AI involves making public the underlying foundation AI models, which can be downloaded, inspected, fine-tuned, and tailored for an unlimited amount of use cases and applications, all for free. Meta's Llama (for Large Language Model Meta AI) is one prominent example of an open-source generative AI model.
Already, hospitals and health professionals are using open-source models like Llama to run health applications on premise, processing patient data locally within the hospital's secure IT environment rather than sending sensitive data into the cloud for processing. Similarly, non-English speaking countries are taking Llama and training the model to speak different languages, creating highly localized and culturally relevant large language models and applications.
Just last month, during United Nations General Assembly week, we unveiled alongside UNESCO and Hugging Face a new online translation interface built on Meta's No Language Left Behind (NLLB) open-source AI model, supporting high-quality translation in 200 languages, including low-resourced and Indigenous languages like Asturian, Luganda, Maori and Urdu. Through this partnership, open-source AI is helping power the International Decade for Indigenous Languages.
We look forward to discovering what open-source can do for Canada .
Read Meta's NewsRoom poston Open Source AI here.
By Kevin Chan, Global Policy Campaign Strategies Director
Kevin Chan is Global Policy Campaign Strategies Director at Meta Platforms, and helped lead the effort to build the UNESCO Language Translator, powered by Meta and Hugging Face