Meta Goes All In on AI: Can It Compete With Google, ChatGPT and MidJourney?

Meta is aggressively scaling up its artificial intelligence efforts in a bid to catch up with competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The social media giant has introduced a new text-to-image model called CM3leon which it claims achieves advanced performance for generating images from text requests. But it’s not yet available for testing or commercial use.

CM3leon marks a breakthrough for AI Meta capabilities. This model can not only generate high fidelity images from text descriptions, but also write coherent captions for existing images. This lays the foundation for more advanced image understanding models in the future.

Meta leverages its data science team and robust computing infrastructure to advance advanced models like CM3leon. While diffusion-based AIs like MidJourney have made headlines, Meta is betting on an autoregressive transformer architecture (the same technology used by ChatGPT). The company claims CM3leon requires 5x less training computation than other comparable methods.

In head-to-head comparisons, CM3leon seems to handle complex objects and constraints in text requests better than models like DALL-E 2 OpenAI, and even Midjourney. Images shared by Meta show that its new text-to-image generator is able to accurately represent human anatomy (no more spaghetti hands) and can even generate accurate text (no more random words in AI images)

CM3leon also provides advanced drawing that allows users to create more accurate representations of ideas: Text to image, image to image, image editing with structure guides, object to image, segmentation to image, and super resolution upscaling are some of the features not available in the generator anything other than Stable Diffusion using Controlnet.

New LLM rumors

Meta is also reportedly planning to release a commercial version of its LLaMA natural language model to outside developers, according to sources cited by Financial timing. If true, this will allow startups and enterprises to build custom applications powered by AI Meta, putting the social media giant in direct competition against ChatGPT (OpenAI-Microsoft), Bard (Google), and Claude v2 (Anthropic-Google)

Meta focus seems to be turning strongly towards AI across all of its applications although it is claimed to be very focused on its metaverse projects as well. Earlier this year, the company set up a dedicated generative AI unit led by Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. Meta is also working on AI tools that generate better ads to target users.

With key open source models such as the leaked LLaMA LLM (the largest, most advanced, open source LLM available in the world), Meta aims to catalyze innovation from developers around the world to advance technology. This contrasts with the closed approach of competitors like OpenAI. However, monetization of the Meta model is still possible.

The flurry of AI activity comes as Meta struggles with sinking stock values ​​and controversies around privacy and misinformation stemming from activity on Facebook, which remains the company’s largest platform. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that this major investment in generative AI aligns with the company’s vision for the metaverse and could open up new revenue streams.

Meta also recently launched Threads, a Twitter clone that saw rapid user growth, surpassing what OpenAI achieved after the launch of ChatGPT. It also proved adept at taking key elements of earlier technologies, improving them, and creating successful products that nearly killed its competitors in the field they created.

With new models like the CM3leon showing promising performances, Meta seems determined to aggressively pursue AI to reshape its future, having left investors unimpressed with its metaverse efforts. The race for the lead in generative AI has just got a new runner.