Facebook parent company Meta has been among the top companies that have launched their large language models (LLMs), the underlying technology of AI chatbots. After launching the first-generation of LLM called Llama, Meta collaborated with Microsoft to roll out a more powerful option, called Llama 2. But it seems that the company now has a problem.
According to a report by The Information, some of the scientists and engineers who worked on Llama have quit the company and joined rival companies or other AI startups.
“Meta Platforms’ releases of its large-language models, Llama and Llama 2, in the past six months have won the company praise for offering free, open-source alternatives to models from OpenAI and Anthropic. But for some of the scientists and engineers who worked on Llama, that praise was too little, too late,” the report said.
Why did researchers leave Meta?
According to the report, an “internal battle” over computing power is to be blamed. This “previously unreported” competition forced the “embittered” employees to quit.
“Many have quit, embittered by a previously unreported internal battle over computing resources with another Meta research team working on a rival model that the company ultimately abandoned,” the report said, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Meta announced that Llama 2 is free for research and commercial use. The company said that Llama 2 was trained on 40% more data than Llama and has double the context length.
Google’s ‘employee drain’
The Information reported earlier this year that top Google AI researcher Jacob Devlin resigned after he warned Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai as well as other top executives that the company’s ChatGPT competitor, Bard, was being trained on data from OpenAI’s chatbot.
Reports also suggested that some employees left the company to join rivals or created their own startups. Pichai, however, said that old Google employees who left in the past have created as many as 2,000 startups which he admires.
“Googlers have left to create over 2,000 startups, last I counted, and I think that’s great. Some of them are cloud customers down the line for us. Some of them come back. I think it’s healthy,” Pichai said.
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