The Llama Impact Grants program will provide $500,000 in grants to projects using Llama 2, its open-source large language model to address grand challenges in education, the environment and social innovation.
“Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence demonstrate the potential for AI to help people accomplish incredible things and provide individuals with new ways to express themselves,” a Meta statement read.
“We don’t believe that we should be the only ones using AI,” Adaora Ikenze, Meta’s Public Policy Director for Anglophone West Africa said on stage at TechCabal’s Moonshot event.
Meta’s Llama 2 grants are open to global organizations focused on providing artificial intelligence-driven solutions for underrepresented communities in education, environment and open innovation which includes AI for research and public interest use cases. Grant applications will be judged for technical feasibility, data privacy responsibility, how the proposed solution would use Llama 2, and impact.
Meta and Microsoft released Llama 2 as an open-source program for research and commercial use in July. Meta’s latest grant program is the latest in salvo in its bid to develop a generative AI platform that can rival OpenAI’s GPT series of AI models. According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, the group behind Llama was only formed this year by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to accelerate the development of generative AI tools.
