Meta will charge cloud providers for using Llama AI

Meta plans to make money from significant cloud-computing companies when they resell its artificial intelligence large language model, Llama 2.

If you’re someone like Microsoft, Amazon or Google, and you’re going to basically be reselling the services, that’s something that we think we should get some portion of the revenue for. I don’t think that that’s going to be a large amount of revenue in the near-term, but over the long term, hopefully that can be something.

Mark Zuckerberg

That’s a change in tone from just last week, when the company said it would be providing the technology for free.

On July 18, Meta announced that it’s teaming up with Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to offer its large language model for commercial use on its partners’ cloud offerings without charging for access or use.

Instead, Meta said that making the technology available for free and opening its source code would result in improvements from a wider community of developers.

Zuckerberg is still calling Llama 2 open, and reiterated those benefits on Wednesday’s call. But in addition to making the technology open-source, Meta also included a term for the largest cloud companies that they don’t get a free license to use it, but have to make a business arrangement with Meta, Zuckerberg said.

Large language models, or LLMs, power text-based chatbots, though their uses aren’t limited to helping AI answer questions. The models are trained by being fed immense amounts of information, usually from the internet, to refine a process for generating responses.