Meta releases Llama 3, brings Meta AI to WhatsApp and Instagram
Meta has released Llama 3, with 8 billion- and 70 billion-parameter models, and rolled out its Meta AI assistant across its main apps. The company aims to make generative AI an everyday feature for billions of users.
Meta unveiled Llama 3 on Thursday, its new family of open language models, and began integrating the Meta AI assistant into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The dual launch brings together two efforts that had so far advanced separately: offering technology to developers and putting a chatbot in front of an audience of unprecedented scale.
The first release includes models with 8 billion and 70 billion parameters. Parameters are the values a model adjusts during training to learn patterns in language, code and other data. Meta also confirmed that it is training a much larger version with more than 400 billion parameters, although it has not set a release date.
Two open models with a proprietary license
Llama 3 comes in base versions for those who want to adapt them, as well as versions fine-tuned for conversation and following instructions. Meta says the 70 billion-parameter model represents a significant improvement over Llama 2 in reasoning, coding and instruction following, and competes with similarly sized commercial models on several benchmarks.
The company trained this generation on more than 15 trillion tokens, the units of text models process. According to Meta, that figure is more than seven times the amount of data used for Llama 2. It has also increased the share of coding data and content in languages other than English.
Llama’s openness does not mean it is open-source software in the strictest sense. Its weights—the files needed to run the model—can be downloaded and used for research and commercial purposes under Meta’s community license. However, companies with more than 700 million monthly active users must request specific authorization.
That distinction matters because Llama has become one of the most widely used alternatives to closed models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Being able to download it lets organizations run it on their own servers, adapt it to a specific task and avoid routing every query through an external API. In return, whoever deploys it takes on responsibility for the infrastructure, security and evaluation of its potential failures.
Meta AI enters the company’s apps
The most visible novelty for the public is not the model but the assistant that uses it. Meta AI is beginning to roll out in English in the United States within WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, as well as on the meta.ai website. The assistant can answer questions, help plan tasks, recommend options and generate images from written prompts.
In some Facebook and Instagram search features, Meta AI will appear directly in the box where users already type their queries. The company wants AI to be not a separate app users have to open deliberately, but a layer built into the places where they already chat, search for content and share links.
Meta AI can also draw on web search results provided by Bing. That is a significant decision: on its own, a language model responds based on the information it learned during training and may be outdated or wrong. With web access, its answers can incorporate recent information, although they still need to be checked when important matters are involved.
The challenge is not just technical
Meta has a distribution advantage that is difficult to match. WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger bring together billions of people, and the assistant is being introduced into products that are already part of their routines. OpenAI popularized the chatbot as a standalone destination with ChatGPT; Meta is trying to make conversations with AI happen inside existing social and messaging apps.
But that advantage raises practical questions. In a group conversation, for example, invoking Meta AI means sending a request to the company’s systems—something worth keeping in mind before sharing sensitive data. Meta will need to clearly explain what information it uses to improve its services, how it separates private conversations from queries to the assistant and how it prevents incorrect answers in products used at massive scale.
For now, the rollout is limited to English and the United States. The decisive test will be whether Meta AI proves useful beyond image-generation demos and quick answers, and whether Llama 3 can establish itself as a technical foundation for companies and developers that do not want to depend on a single provider of closed models.
