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Meta launches Llama 3 in 8B, 70B parameters, becoming #1 open model

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Top stories today:

  1. Meta launches Llama 3 in 8B, 70B parameters, becoming #1 open model
  2. Meta AI assistant gets Meta.AI website, expands beyond U.S.
  3. Netflix beat earnings as operating margin +7 p.p. to 28%
  4. Bitcoin halving today at ~6PM ET
  5. Microsoft’s VASA-1 research AI turns photos into talking faces

0. Data and calendar

All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).

All times are ET.

1. Meta launches Llama 3 in 8B, 70B parameters, becoming #1 open model

Llama 3 is already #5 on LMSYS's Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, tying with Gemini Pro and Claude 3 Sonnet:

  • Available for download now.

  • Trained on 15T tokens, vs. 2T for Llama 2.

  • 8K context window, which is short when compared to Gemini 1.5 Pro (128K) or GPT-3.5 (16K).

  • Hard to see how small startups or nonprofits could compete with Meta in producing an open model.

Meta is also training a ~400B model that is reaching GPT-4/Claude 3 Opus/Gemini Ultra quality

  • Also coming: multimodal models.

  • Llama 3.x may fully catch up with closed-source models in 1-12 months, especially if GPT-5 is delayed and without major new advances to the Transformers architecture.

Zuck did a great podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel about Llama 3

2. Meta AI assistant gets Meta.AI website, expands beyond U.S.

Meta’s AI image generator works in real-time and at an amazing speed

*Sponsored.

4. Netflix beat earnings as operating margin +7 p.p. to 28%, revenue +15% to $9.4B

9M subscribers were added in the quarter, with the total number reaching 270M

  • 2025 Q1: No longer to report subscriber count.

    • Stock -6% in the pre-market.

5. Bitcoin halving today at ~6PM ET

Bitcoin’s previous halvings have preceded price jumps, although this time crypto prices anticipated the halving:

  • # of BTC mined per ~10 minutes to halve, from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC.

  • From $20B to $10B/year in mined BTC.

  • BTC +5% to $64K in the past 24 hours, still below its $74K all-time high reached in Mar.

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