The parent company of Facebook, Meta Platforms (hereafter referred to as Meta), and Amazon's cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), have teamed up to attract developers in the artificial intelligence (AI) competition.
According to U.S. broadcaster CNN on the 16th (local time), Meta has decided to run a program that provides six months of technical support from Meta and AWS engineers and $200,000 (approximately 279 million won) in AWS cloud computing credits to 30 startups in the U.S. that aim to develop AI tools based on its developed large language model (LLM) Llama. Although Meta released Llama 4 last April, its launch has been delayed beyond expectations, and it has received evaluations for performance that fall short of expectations.
In response, Meta is establishing the 'Meta Superintelligence Research Institute' to develop AI that surpasses humans and is investing heavily to attract AI talent. It hired Alexander Wang, co-founder of the AI startup ScaleAI, as its chief AI officer and acquired 49% of his company's equity for $14.3 billion. It has also poached numerous AI talents from competitors, including Daniel Gross, CEO of the AI startup 'Safe Superintelligence,' founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
From AWS's perspective, there is an advantage in that the selected startups can become new customers of its cloud computing service if they develop AI tools based on Llama. John Jones, AWS's global head of startups and venture capital, noted, 'We have a long-standing partnership with Meta and aim to support startups in building innovative AI using the Llama model through our collaboration.'