Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella seal the AI deal with an Instagram pic

Facebook’s parent company Meta has built an artificial intelligence system that rivals the likes of ChatGPT, but it's taking a different approach: releasing it for free.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company is partnering with Microsoft to introduce the next generation of its AI large language model and making the technology, known as Llama 2, free for research and commercial use.

Zuckerberg posed with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella for a power-packed Instagram picture while announcing the deal. “Today, we're open sourcing Llama 2 with our preferred partner @microsoft. This gives researchers and businesses access to build with our next generation large language model as the foundation of their work. Grateful to Satya and our teams for making this happen,” he wrote.

The Instagram picture shows the two Silicon Valley heavyweights dressed in blue and smiling for the camera.
Much like tech peers Google and Microsoft, Meta has long had a big research team of computer scientists devoted to advancing AI technology. But it's been overshadowed as the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked a rush to profit off of ‘generative AI’ tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, but its partnership with Meta indicates that it is broadening its AI bets beyond the ChatGPT-creator. And while Meta has described Microsoft as its “preferred partner,” Meta has said the models will also be available through Amazon Web Services, which is Microsoft's main cloud rival, as well as AI startup Hugging Face and others.