San Diego-based wireless technology leader, Qualcomm, announced on July 18, 2023, that it will partner with Meta to optimize the implementation of Meta’s large language model, Llama 2, on devices. By bringing this powerful AI tool directly onto devices, Qualcomm aims to increase user privacy, boost application reliability, enhance personalization, and significantly reduce costs for developers compared to relying solely on cloud-based AI services.
Qualcomm plans to offer Llama 2-based AI implementations on devices starting from 2024. The new on-device AI experiences will be powered by Snapdragon®, Qualcomm’s industry-leading platform, and will facilitate the creation of innovative AI applications, ranging from intelligent virtual assistants to productivity tools, content creation resources, and entertainment options. These AI experiences will even work in environments with no connectivity, expanding their potential use cases dramatically.
Durga Malladi, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Technology, Planning and Edge Solutions Businesses at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., applauded Meta’s approach to open and responsible AI. He added, “To effectively scale generative AI into the mainstream, AI will need to run on both the cloud and devices at the edge, such as smartphones, laptops, vehicles, and IoT devices.”
The collaboration between Qualcomm and Meta extends their existing relationship of driving technological innovation and delivering premium device experiences. Qualcomm’s leadership in on-device AI and its extensive footprint in edge devices – with billions of devices including smartphones, vehicles, XR headsets, and IoT devices – uniquely position it to support the Llama ecosystem and provide the opportunity for generative AI to scale.
Developers keen to start optimizing applications for on-device AI can leverage the Qualcomm® AI Stack. These dedicated tools enable more efficient AI processing on Snapdragon, making on-device AI feasible even on smaller, lighter devices.
The Llama 2 model, released today by Meta, is a collection of pretrained and fine-tuned large language models, optimized for dialogue use cases. The model outperforms open-source chat models on most benchmarks tested and, based on human evaluations for helpfulness and safety, could serve as a suitable substitute for closed-source models.
Qualcomm, known as a pioneer in wireless technology and a driving force behind the development and expansion of 5G, continues to push the boundaries of innovation with this latest announcement. As the race to deliver superior on-device AI capabilities heats up, the partnership between Qualcomm and Meta is set to offer developers exciting new tools to revolutionize user experiences across a broad range of devices and applications.
