IBL News | New York
Meta released this month an updated version of model Code Llama 70B. This improved model can write code more accurately in various programming languages, such as Python, C++, Java, and PHP, from natural language prompts or existing code snippets.
Based on the open-source Llama 2, one of the largest LLMs in the world, with 175 billion parameters, Code Llama is a collection of pre-trained and fine-tuned generative text models ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters.
The model 70B version — which is available in Hugging Face — is designed for general code synthesis and understanding, while Llama 2 is a general-purpose LLM that can generate text in any domain and style, from poetry to news articles.
Code Llama 70B has been fine-tuned for code generation using a technique called self-attention, which allows it to learn the relationships and dependencies between different parts of the code.
Code generation has been a long-standing goal of computer scientists, as it promises to make software development more efficient, accessible, and creative.
However, unlike natural language, which is often ambiguous and flexible, code is precise and rigid. It has to follow strict rules and syntax, and it has to produce the desired output and behavior.
Code generation models need to have a lot of data, computing power, and intelligence.
Code Llama 70B has been trained on 500 billion tokens of code and code-related data, making it more capable and robust than its predecessors, according to Meta.
It also has a larger context window of 100,000 tokens, which enables it to process and generate longer and more complex code.
Code Llama 70B also includes CodeLlama-70B-Python, a variant that has been optimized for Python. This variant has been trained on an additional 100 billion tokens of Python code, making it more fluent and accurate in generating Python code. CodeLlama-70B-Python can also handle a range of tasks, such as web scraping, data analysis, machine learning (ML), and web development.
Code Llama 70B is available for free download under the same license as Llama 2 and previous Code Llama models, which allows both researchers and commercial users to use and modify it.
The model can be accessed and used through various platforms and frameworks, such as Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Jupyter Notebook. More information and documentation can be found on GitHub and Hugging Face.
Meta AI also provides documentation and tutorials on how to use and fine-tune the model for different purposes and languages.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta AI, said in a statement posted to his Facebook account: “We’re open-sourcing a new and improved Code Llama, including a larger 70B parameter model. Writing and editing code has emerged as one of the most important uses of AI models today. The ability to code has also proven to be important for AI models to process information in other domains more rigorously and logically. I’m proud of the progress here, and looking forward to including these advances in Llama 3 and future models as well.”
Code Llama 70B is expected to have a significant impact on the field of code generation and the software development industry, as it offers a powerful and accessible tool for creating and improving code. It can also lower the barrier to entry for people who want to learn coding, as it can provide guidance and feedback based on natural language instructions. Moreover, Code Llama 70B can potentially enable new applications and use cases, such as code translation, code summarization, code documentation, code analysis, and code debugging.
.
