'Mistral is Peanuts For Us': Meta Execs Obsessed Over Beating OpenAI's GPT-4 Internally, Court Filings Reveal

Executives and researchers leading Meta's AI efforts obsessed over beating OpenAI's GPT-4 model while developing Llama 3, according to internal messages unsealed by a court in one of the company's ongoing AI copyright cases, Kadrey v. Meta. From a report: 'Honestly... Our goal needs to be GPT-4,' said Meta's VP of Generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, in an October 2023 message to Meta researcher Hugo Touvron. 'We have 64k GPUs coming! We need to learn how to build frontier and win this race.'

Though Meta releases open AI models, the company's AI leaders were far more focused on beating competitors that don't typically release their model's weights, like Anthropic and OpenAI, and instead gate them behind an API. Meta's execs and researchers held up Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4 as a gold standard to work toward. The French AI startup Mistral, one of the biggest open competitors to Meta, was mentioned several times in the internal messages, but the tone was dismissive. 'Mistral is peanuts for us,' Al-Dahle said in a message. 'We should be able to do better,' he said later.

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