On Thursday, tech giant Meta announced the launch of a new tool called “Code Llama,” built upon its large language model, Llama 2, this tool possesses the capability to generate programming instructions and rectify human-written code errors.
In a blog post, the American technology company elucidated that Code Llama will be employed under the same open-source license as Llama 2, it is free for both research and commercial use.
According to Meta, Code Llama is adept at generating sequences of programming instructions from prompts or completing existing code instructions, it can also identify and rectify errors when provided with a specific code snippet.
In addition to the core Code Llama model, Meta introduced specialized versions, such as “Code Llama-Python” tailored for the Python programming language, and “Code Llama-Instrct,” which is capable of understanding natural language instructions.
The company emphasized that each specific version of Code Llama serves a distinct purpose and discouraged using the basic Code Llama or Code Llama-Python for natural language instructions, Meta stated, “Programmers are already using large language models to assist with a variety of tasks, ranging from writing new programs to debugging existing code.”
Meta’s goal, as expressed in their post, is to enhance developer workflow efficiency, allowing them to focus more on the creative and human-centric aspects of their work.
Meta claimed that Code Llama outperformed publicly available large language models in performance tests, registering a score of 53.7% on the HumanEval benchmark for code instructions, it demonstrated accurate code generation based on textual descriptions.
Meta plans to release three levels of Code Llama, with the smallest version suitable for a single graphics processing unit to support projects with low latency requirements.
It’s noteworthy that code generation tools have become essential aids for developers, GitHub launched “Copilot,” powered by the GPT-4 language model, which facilitates rapid code generation and verification, GitHub’s Copilot can even rewrite old code to bring it up to date.
Amazon Web Services also possesses “CodeWhisperer,” a tool that generates, verifies, and updates code, Google has its own tool for code generation, “AlphaCode,” which hasn’t been released yet.
