Subscribe to our daily and weekly newsletters to stay updated on the latest industry-leading AI coverage and exclusive content.
Meta AI, the company behind Llama 2, the impressive language model capable of generating anything from tweets to essays, has just introduced an improved version of its code generation model, Code Llama 70B. This updated model can write code in various programming languages such as Python, C++, Java, and PHP, using natural language prompts or existing code snippets. It is faster, more efficient, and more accurate than previous versions.
Code Llama 70B is one of the largest open-source AI models for code generation and sets a new benchmark in this field. Code generation aims to automate the creation and modification of software, making software development more efficient, accessible, and creative. Imagine instructing your computer to write code, modify existing code with simple commands, or translate code from one language to another with ease. These are just a few potentials of models like Code Llama 70B.
Although code generation is a challenging task due to the precise and rigid nature of code, which must follow strict rules and syntax, Code Llama 70B rises to the challenge. It has been trained on 500 billion tokens of code and related data, making it more capable than its predecessors. Its larger context window of 100,000 tokens enables it to process and generate longer, more complex code.
Based on Llama 2, a general-purpose language model with 175 billion parameters, Code Llama 70B has been fine-tuned for code generation using a technique called self-attention. This allows it to understand the relationships and dependencies within code.
One standout feature of Code Llama 70B is CodeLlama-70B-Instruct, a variant optimized for understanding natural language instructions and generating corresponding code. This variant scored 67.8 on HumanEval, a benchmark for testing code generation models’ functional correctness and logic. This score surpasses previous open models and is comparable to closed models like GPT-4 and Gemini Pro. CodeLlama-70B-Instruct can handle various tasks, including data sorting, searching, filtering, and algorithm implementation.
The model also includes CodeLlama-70B-Python, specially optimized for Python, one of the most popular programming languages. Trained on an additional 100 billion tokens of Python code, it excels in web scraping, data analysis, machine learning, and web development tasks.
Code Llama 70B is freely available under the same license as Llama 2 and previous models, making it accessible for both research and commercial use. It can be used through platforms like Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Jupyter Notebook, with Meta AI providing documentation and tutorials for different uses.
Meta AI CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the importance of AI models capable of writing and editing code and announced plans to include these advancements in future models like Llama 3.
Code Llama 70B is poised to revolutionize code generation and software development, making it a powerful and accessible tool. It can help lower the barrier to entry for learning coding and enable new applications, such as code translation, summarization, documentation, analysis, and debugging.
For more information and to download Code Llama 70B and other Llama models, visit Meta AI’s GitHub and Hugging Face pages.