Heard of Llama? Earlier on Thursday, Meta, that’s the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced that its AI model collection Llama, has had over 100 crore downloads. “From top tech companies to universities, people and organisations all over the world are using Llama to innovate, drive scientific advances, and unlock new economic opportunities,” claimed Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
Llama is at the centre of Meta’s desperate attempt to make inroads into the race for global domination in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) race —its Meta AI, presently present in its trinity of apps, set to debut as a standalone later this summer.
🚀 Introducing Uno: A simple voice-enabled AI chatbot with Llama 3.3 & JavaScript!
— Alex Bobeda (@alexandrebobeda) March 20, 2025
Uno is a voice chatbot I’ve crafted at my AB Studio. Built upon @Meta Llama 3.3 + JavaScript, Uno offers a seamless, next-gen conversational experience with a glowing cyberpunk-inspired interface. pic.twitter.com/Uru29B1vCC
But in the larger scheme of things, Meta AI would still have to prove its mettle in a keenly contested space, where the big guns are OpenAI’s ChatGPT, locked in a battle for sweepstakes with Alphabet’s Gemini as well as China’s DeepSeek.
ChatGPT has ruled the roost since it made AI mainstream a couple of years ago, but it got a near-existential knock recently from DeepSeek, that’s the name of a family of AI models from the company of the same name that developed it all in mainland China. While DeepSeek’s back story — struggling against sanctions which made it impossible to get powerful processors and still coming out with a top-notch product, is lovely enough, over the course of time, the sheen seems to have faded.
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First, the fact that its answers aren’t really objective, especially when it comes to China and its sensitive political past was taken to town by its detractors, especially on social media. The difficulty in installing it by non-tech users may also come in the way. But then again, its cost-effectiveness could well be an effective counterbalance.
That brings us to the biggest gainer in recent months — Gemini. While Alphabet had an ignoble recent past with the Bard, interestingly its Gemini seems to have gained leaps and bounds. Google has also gone to town, particularly in India, with its ‘talk’ feature, while its appeal for enterprise users comes from the fact that it is well integrated into the Google ecosystem. This means Gemini integrates not just into search, but can also access your workspace, and thereby, also search and answer from your Gmail inbox, too. (ChatGPT can also do it, but you need to connect it and give it the right prompt).
Where does all this leave Apple? The king of desirable smartphones may just have postponed the already-delayed release of its AI push, which it calls ‘Apple Intelligence’, if reports are to be believed. Siri may just be the surprise laggard in the whole race for AI domination.
Finally, if there is one thing that the field of tech has taught us, that is that all it takes is one cutting-edge innovation to transform fortunes almost overnight. Nokia and BlackBerry will nod grimly, and if you need an example from the AI scene, the way OpenAI came from nowhere and stole the AI thunder with its ChatGPT, even as biggies like Alphabet, Amazon and Apple were stuck at the starting block. Of course, OpenAI itself will know the harsh truth that it is even tougher, just running to stand still, or, in other words, holding on to the top spot.
