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Facebook owner Meta has announced the release of a new large language model product for generating and commenting on code.
Code Llama is built on top of Meta’s Llama 2 LLM offering and is currently completely free to use for both commercial and research use cases under the Llama 2 community licence agreement.
According to Meta, Code Llama can be used to boost coding productivity and as a tool for teaching code. It was built on the same dataset as Llama 2 – released in July 2023 – but with an emphasis on code-specific samples. Essentially, Code Llama focused on more code samples for a more extended period of time.
Code Llama can turn a natural language prompt – such as “In Bash, how do I list all text files in the current directory (excluding subdirectories) that have been modified in the last month?” – into code, or natural language discussing or explaining code. It supports a wide range of programming languages, such as C++, Python, Java, PHP, Typescript, C#, and Bash.
There are three models available, each with different parameters. The 7B and 13B versions are the faster models, while the 34B version delivers better results for assisting coders.
“Code Llama is designed to support software engineers in all sectors – including research, industry, open source projects, NGOs and businesses,” Meta said in a statement. “But there are still many more use cases to support.”
Meta also added further fine-tuning to its Code Llama – Python and Code Llama – Instruct offerings.
The Python version has been fine-tuned with a further 100B tokens of code, while the Instruct version is best used with natural language prompts alongside the hoped-for final code.
“Because Python is the most benchmarked language for code generation, and because Python and PyTorch play an important role in the AI community,” Meta said, “we believe a specialised model provides additional utility”.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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