Hello, hi! It’s Friday, a great day to ship to production. Today, I’m talking about Zuck’s glowup and Meta’s new AI models. But first…

The headlines: 

🔐 The UK is weighing up whether AI can help protect younger internet users. 

💰 Mistral, the French AI company, wants to raise $500m at a $5B valuation.

🍎 Apple has removed Threads and WhatsApp from the Chinese app store.

Meta isn’t going to just sit back and watch OpenAI run away with the AI trophy. Quite the opposite, actually, based on yesterday’s announcement. ICYMI: Mark Zuckerberg, or should I say “Zuck,” took to Instagram Live to announce Llama 3, the company’s largest suite of AI models to date.

So what’s the big deal? Well, a few things. First is the size of the models. In total, there are three of them. The two smallest, Llama 8B and 70B, contain 8 billion and 70 billion parameters (settings that guide AI's learning process), respectively. A third and much larger model, Llama 400B, contains 400 billion parameters. Yes, you read that right. 

Second is the amount of data these models are trained on. According to the company announcement, Llama 3 models were trained on over 15 trillion tokens (specific units like words that models are trained on) while the previous generation, Llama 2, was trained on 2 trillion tokens — a respectable amount, for sure, but eclipsed by today’s model. 

Third is how it compares to other models on the market. Meta claims Llama 8B and 70B are “among the best-performing models for their respective parameter count.” That’s a big claim to make, so how does it actually stack up? 

Meta points to Llama 3’s score across different AI benchmarks like MMLU and ARC, which test models based on a number of questions ranging from biology to mathematics. According to those scores, Llama 8B beats the likes of Mistral 7B and Gemini 7B, while Llama 70B beats Gemini 1.5 Pro and comes up just short of Anthropics most powerful model, Claude 3 Opus.

Like previous models, Llama 3 is entirely open-source, so developers can contribute to its direction and improvements. Who knows, maybe we will crowdsource AGI? 

If you want to test out Llama 3, head over to Meta’s standalone AI website where you can chat directly with the currently available models (8B and 70B) as long as you’re in a country where it’s currently available. Alongside that, you can try out Meta’s AI assistant directly on Instagram now. 

• Nothing launched a new set of colorful, AI-enabled earphones.
• Ugly Duckling is an analytics tool for being more consistent on X.
• HuggingFace launched a chatbot app for iOS.

Shout out are where makers call out the products that help make their own possible. 

That doesn’t mean they’re all developer tools! Take this story: 

Ugly Duckling is a web app for X analytics by #buildinpublic maker Norbert Jurga. It first launched a year ago, but when Elon cracked down on Twitter scraping, things were looking ugly for that duck. 

Now, Jurga has relaunched as a web app that uses the X’s API, and he shouted out the Morning Maker Show for helping him overcome roadblocks at his low points. The Morning Maker Show, hosted by Sandra Djajic and Dan Mindru, is a live, weekday audio show focused on topics special to independent makers and those #buildinginpublic. Check it out. 

• Pietra launched a new tool for generating product images with AI.
• Bridge is a platform that allows users to give feedback more easily. 
• Cascadeur helps you clean up and edit 3D assets with AI.