The event was held on Wednesday Meta Link 2024and inside we had the opportunity to explore stunning new features such as the Orion augmented reality glasses or the Meta Quest 3S, the company’s new affordable mixed reality glasses.

Not much has been talked about Llama 3.2, the new version of the now multimodal LLM with which the company is trying to conquer this segment.

The fact that it continues to boast that its AI is Open Source is almost the least of it: the interesting thing is that call 3.2 Not only chatbots that compete with ChatGPT or Claude are offered, but also “compact” versions for our mobile phones.

Meta wants to sneak into our mobile phone with Llama

It is true that Llama 3.2 will have a giant 405B model (405,000 million parameters) and two traditional models (90B and 11B), but It will also offer two lightweight models With 1,000 and 3,000 million parameters (1D and 3D, respectively), it wants, as we say, to “get into” our phones.

The performance of the “light” models of Llama 3.2 is promising. It’s not at all obvious that this will help much.

According to Meta’s internal analysis, the performance of these models is on par with rivals such as the Gemma 2 2.6B or Phi-3.5-mini in tasks such as creating summaries, rewriting texts, or following instructions.

in the company We cooperated with Qualcomm and MediaTek This development suggests smooth operation in these chips.

It’s clear they want to put Llama on our phones, but there’s a software component that needs to show Meta how difficult that is.

Web browser.

“Default” browser trap

That’s it. The heroes of one of the great technological wars were browsers. rise of the internet Spinned Netscape into OpenAI in the late 90s. Microsoft soon clipped the wings of this project and managed to make Internet Explorer an integral part of Windows for a while.

Then came Firefox, antitrust lawsuits, the famous voting screen, and Google Chrome, which crushed all its rivals, including Safari, with a lower share even on Macs (only 9.4%).

Of course on PC, because with the advent of smartphones Both Google and Apple wanted to tighten the screws on us. Of course, it was worth it for them: These browsers integrated search engines, and these search engines made a lot of money.

This is how we reach a situation similar to the current one, where our smartphones certainly allow us to use other browsers, but the default pre-installed browser is Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. And many people do not change the default browser, and Google and Apple know this.

Global market share of browsers on mobile devices. Chrome and Safari are available on 9 out of 10 devices.

This means that two in three users use Chrome as a browser on mobile (66.2%, according to Statcounter GlobalStats), and almost one in four users use Safari (23.26%, same source). This helps a lot here. to the immense popularity of the iPhone.

Are there other browsers on iOS and Android? Certainly. Do you know what their joint quota is right now? Only 10% This drops to 6% if we exclude Samsung’s browser, which logically makes (some) profit by capitalizing on the popularity of mobile phones.

Google, Apple and Microsoft won’t make it any easier

The state of mobile browsers makes us think about the future of artificial intelligence on our computers and laptops. The movements we have seen in recent months confirm this:

• Google. Gemini integrates everything it can as part of the Android experience to go beyond what we’ve been able to do with Google Assistant so far.
• Apple. The release of Apple Intelligence as an integral part of iOS, iPadOS and macOS means the same for iPhones, but also for iPad or Mac.
• Microsoft. Co-pilots are all around us, and slowly they too are becoming a native component of Windows 11.

The three main protagonists of the software experience on our mobile phones and computers are starting to deliver AI experiences by default, as they already do in the browser, leaving their competitors at a clear disadvantage.

Meta, Anthropic, and even OpenAI face a complicated future: If they can’t propose a development with different features, It will be very difficult for us to use them because “hey, we already have a chatbot pre-installed and that’s not bad.”

We insist that this is what happens in browsers. And it’s very likely that this will also happen with artificial intelligence platforms that want to get into our computers and mobile phones.

in Xataka | The European Artificial Intelligence Act has recently been adopted by more than 100 companies. There are two big missing people: Apple and Meta