Something has caught Satya Nadella’s attention. It’s a small thing—just a five-letter word inside a box, lurking in the corner of a complicated PowerPoint slide, flashed on a screen for a fraction of a second inside a convention hall in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But it niggles. “You’re doing also Llama? You’re using both?” Nadella asks, a note of surprise in his voice.
Llama is the AI model, not the animal. It is a piece of open-source software created by Meta, the social media giant that has pivoted hard to AI and is competing with Microsoft and others to dominate the foundations of the emerging generative AI economy. “Both” is a reference to the fact that this Malaysian agriculture technology company—chosen to show off its use of Microsoft’s technology to Microsoft’s CEO— is using Meta’s rival AI model in addition to GPT-4, the large language model (LLM) created by Microsoft’s strategic partner, OpenAI. Nadella wants his Redmond, Wash.–based software giant to have the most capable, popular AI models on the market.
