Meta Platforms has unveiled its first natively multimodal model, Chameleon, which observers say can make it competitive with frontier model firms. Although Chameleon is not yet released, Meta says internal research indicates it outperforms the company’s own Llama 2 in text-only tasks and “matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models” including Google’s Gemini Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-4V in a mixed-modal generation evaluation “where either the prompt or outputs contain mixed sequences of both images and text.” In addition, Meta calls Chameleon’s image generation “non-trivial,” noting that’s “all in a single model.” Continue reading Meta Advances Multimodal Model Architecture with Chameleon

Facebook and AI startup Hugging Face open-sourced their new natural language processing model, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which finds and interprets contextual information on the fly. RAG is now available as a component of the Hugging Face transformer library, integrated with the new Datasets library to offer the indexed knowledge source RAG relies on. According to Facebook, RAG can alter or add to its internal knowledge, letting researchers control the model without needing to retrain it. Continue reading Facebook Makes New Natural Language Model Open Source