Meta’s Next AI Attack on OpenAI: Free Code-Generating Software

Meta Platforms is preparing to launch software to help developers automatically generate programming code, a challenge to proprietary software from OpenAI, Google and others, according to two people with direct knowledge of the product. Meta’s code-generating artificial intelligence model, dubbed Code Llama, will be open-source and could launch as soon as next week, one of these people said.

The new coding model rivals OpenAI’s coding models and builds on Meta’s Llama 2 software, a large-language model that can understand and generate conversational text. Llama 2, which is open-source, upended the AI field by making it easier for companies to make their own AI apps without paying for software from OpenAI, Google or Microsoft. Code Llama will make it easier for companies to develop AI assistants that automatically suggest code to developers as they type, and it could siphon customers from paid coding assistants such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI.