Will the U.S. Government Start Using Meta’s AI?
By Movieguide® Contributor
Meta is reportedly pushing for the U.S. government to start using its AI, Llama — but what does that really mean?
During the company’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Meta is “working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government.”
A reporter from The Verge reached out to Meta for comment, and spokesperson Faith Eischen explained that the company has “partnered with the US State Department to see how Llama could help address different challenges — from expanding access to safe water and reliable electricity to helping support small businesses.”
Eischen added that Meta has also “been in touch with the Department of Education to learn how Llama could help make the financial aid process more user friendly for students and are in discussions with others about how Llama could be utilized to benefit the government.”
So, what makes Meta’s Llama different from other A.I. programs?
TechCrunch explained that Llama is “unique” because it’s “open…meaning developers can download and use it however they please,” as opposed to ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
“Like other generative AI models, Llama can perform a range of different assistive tasks, like coding and answering basic math questions, as well as summarizing documents in eight languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish and Thai),” the outlet continued. “Most text-based workloads — think analyzing files like PDFs and spreadsheets — are within its purview; none of the Llama models can process or generate images, although that may change in the near future.”
Zuckerberg shared that Meta’s expectations for Llama have been exceeded — which means AI spending is about to go up at the company, too.
“Going into the year, we had a range for what we thought we could potentially do, and we’ve been able to do more than we’ve kind of hoped and expected at the beginning of the year,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s actually something that I’m quite happy that the team is executing well on. That execution makes me somewhat more optimistic that we’re going to be able to keep on building this out at a good pace.”
Meta has been steadily upgrading their AI programs throughout the apps they own.
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