Meta's LlaMA goes free range, partners with Microsoft

Welcome to VP Land - your daily update for all things virtual production & AI in video.

In this issue:

👨‍💻 Meta’s LlaMA 2 goes open source-source
📷 ZEISS acquires Ncam
🕹️ How XR is shaping the arcade industry

And more! Let’s dive in.

PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY

LlaMA 2 goes open-source, Microsoft expands its AI empire

Meta has open-sourced its Large Language Model (LLaMA 2), posing a competitive challenge to OpenAI's GPT-4. The move, unveiled at Microsoft's Inspire event, is part of a wider push to foster AI innovation among businesses, startups, and researchers and comes amidst details of deeper partnerships with Microsoft and Qualcomm.

• Meta's LLaMA 2, now free for commercial and research use, is being positioned as a rival to OpenAI's GPT-4, with both platforms offering sophisticated text-generation capabilities.

• Microsoft's Inspire event marked a notable expansion of the partnership between Meta and Microsoft, with LLaMA 2 set to be supported on Azure and Windows.

• Microsoft also shed light on the AI tools integrated into its 360 platform, along with their associated costs.

• Qualcomm is collaborating with Meta to integrate LLaMA into laptops, phones, and headsets from 2024 for AI apps that can operate without cloud services.

• By open-sourcing LLaMA 2, Meta aims to boost safety and transparency while enabling community-led experimentation with AI tools.

• LLaMA 2, trained on 40% more data compared to its predecessor, reportedly outperforms rival models in tests of reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge.

• Meta maintains that the move to open-source allows for stress-testing of models, leading to swift identification and resolution of issues.

• After a leak of the initial LLaMA model on 4chan, Meta's decision to freely provide access to LLaMA 2 is likely to see a broader range of AI-powered tools leveraging the model.

SECOND UNIT

ZEISS Goes Virtual, Acquires Ncam

ZEISS, the Germany-based technology company and lens manufacturer, has acquired UK-based camera tracking company Ncam.

The acquisition bolsters ZEISS's technology offerings for the cinema, broadcast, and visual effects industries. It also complements ZEISS's cinema product lineup and expands the CinCraft ecosystem. By joining forces, ZEISS and Ncam plan to develop innovative tracking and visual effects solutions for professional production workflows.

AKS

• OpenAI penned a $5 million deal to help local news organizations utilize AI. The $5m is in the form of a grant through the American Journalism Project. For OpenAI, this is presumably a way to get their tools used but also paving another source to get updated news articles fed into their models.

• Long article on how XR is making its way into arcade games

• Upload large files and folders fast with MASV*

• The 3 biggest challenges Intel currently faces and how it could overcome them

• 35% of the companies in Y Combinator's latest cohort are AI-related.

• Previz panel for Indy 5 at Comic-Con

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