NEW YORK, April 18 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms ( META )

on Thursday released early versions of its latest large language

model, Llama 3, and an image generator that updates pictures in

real time while users type prompts, as it races to catch up to

generative AI market leader OpenAI.

The models will be integrated into virtual assistant Meta

AI, which the company is pitching as the most sophisticated of

its free-to-use peers. The assistant will be given more

prominent billing within Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp

and Messenger apps as well as a new standalone website that

positions it to compete more directly with Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed

OpenAI's breakout hit ChatGPT.

The announcement comes as Meta has been scrambling to push

generative AI products out to its billions of users to challenge

OpenAI's leading position on the technology, involving an

overhaul of computing infrastructure and the consolidation of

previously distinct research and product teams.

The social media giant equipped Llama 3 with new computer

coding capabilities and fed it images as well as text this time,

though for now the model will output only text, Meta Chief

Product Officer Chris Cox said in an interview.

More advanced reasoning, like the ability to craft longer

multi-step plans, will follow in subsequent versions, he added.

Versions planned for release in the coming months will also be

capable of "multimodality," meaning they can generate both text

and images, Meta said in blog posts.

"The goal eventually is to help take things off your plate,

just help make your life easier, whether it's interacting with

businesses, whether it's writing something, whether it's

planning a trip," Cox said.

Cox said the inclusion of images in the training of Llama 3

would enhance an update rolling out this year to the Ray-Ban

Meta smart glasses, a partnership with glasses maker Essilor

Luxoticca, enabling Meta AI to identify objects seen

by the wearer and answer questions about them.

Meta also announced a new partnership with Alphabet's

Google to include real-time search results in the

assistant's responses, supplementing an existing arrangement

with Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Bing.

The Meta AI assistant is expanding to more than a dozen

markets outside the U.S. with the update, including Australia,

Canada, Singapore, Nigeria and Pakistan. Meta is "still working

on the right way to do this in Europe," Cox said, where privacy

rules are more stringent and the forthcoming AI Act is poised to

impose requirements like disclosure of models' training data.

Generative AI models' voracious need for data has emerged as

a major source of tension in the technology's development.

Meta has been releasing models like Llama 3 for free

commercial use by developers as part of its catch-up effort, as

the success of a powerful free option could stymie rivals' plans

to earn revenue off their proprietary technology. The strategy

has also elicited safety concerns from critics wary of what

unscrupulous developers may use the model to build.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg nodded at that competition in a

video accompanying the announcement, in which he called Meta AI

"the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use."

Zuckerberg said the biggest version of Llama 3 is currently

being trained with 400 billion parameters and already scoring 85

MMLU, citing metrics used to convey the strength and performance

quality of AI models. The two smaller versions rolling out now

have 8 billion parameters and 70 billion parameters, and the

latter scored around 82 MMLU, or Massive Multitask Language

Understanding, he said.

Developers have complained that the previous Llama 2 version

of the model failed to understand basic context, confusing

queries on how to "kill" a computer program with requests for

instructions on committing murder. Rival Google has run into

similar problems and recently paused use of its Gemini AI image

generation tool after it drew criticism for churning out

inaccurate depictions of historical figures.

Meta said it cut down on those problems in Llama 3 by using

"high quality data" to get the model to recognize nuance. It did

not elaborate on the datasets used, although it said it fed

seven times more data into Llama 3 than it used for Llama 2 and

leveraged "synthetic," or AI-created, data to strengthen areas

like coding and reasoning.

Cox said there was "not a major change in posture" in terms

of how the company sourced its training data.