Meta releases 'world's largest' AI model trained on $400 million worth of GPUs

Meta has announced its release of Llama 3.1 405B, which is what the company is describing as the "world's largest" open-source large language model.

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Meta explains via a new blog post that Llama 3.1 405B is "in a class of its own" with "state-of-the-art capabilities" that rival the leading AI models currently on the market when it comes to general knowledge, steerability, math, multilingual translation, and tool use. Meta directly compares Llama 3.1 405B with competing AI models, such as OpenAI's various GPT models, showcasing the recently released model trained on 15 trillion tokens. A token can be considered a fragment of a question and an answer.

To achieve the training of this 405 billion parameter model, Meta used 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which cost $25,000 each. This means the AI model was trained by $400 million worth of NVIDIA GPUs, which required 30.84 million GPU hours and produced approximately 11,390 tons of CO2.

For comparison's sake, Meta's latest AI model has 405 billion parameters, while OpenAI's GPT-4 is reportedly 220 billion. However, reports indicate GPT-4 could essentially be eight AI models hiding under one trench coat, making a total of 1.7 trillion parameters. This isn't confirmed and is rumored.

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