Did you see those llamas? In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a new herd of llamas into the wild. We’re not talking the species known as Lama glama (really), with their distinctive soft wool and trademark intelligence. No, Zuckerberg’s llamas are free, open-source AI models, now as smart as the latest AI powering ChatGPT-4o.
By: Paul Marsden, Digital Strategist SYZYGY GROUP
Why should marketers care about smart silicon llamas? Two reasons:
1. High-performance open-source llamas (Llama 3.1 405b to be precise) will accelerate the AI arms race, as developers adopt, train, and tune these SOTA (state-of-the-art) AI models, and competitors race to regain advantage. This means more change and more innovation for marketing. If you thought the pace of AI change was fast, it’s about to get a whole lot faster.
For example, in July, OpenAI rushed out quick updates to race ahead: real-time voice conversation mode, ChatGPT-4o mini (small, smart, and cheap), and an AI search engine – SearchGPT. The AI lab also hinted at a secret strawberry-flavoured smart source that would make ChatGPT far smarter, with superhuman reasoning, planning, and analysis abilities. Around Llama 3.1’s launch, other AI labs – Google, Apple, Mistral, Midjourney, and Runway – all scrambled to release their own updates. Meanwhile, Elon Musk grabbed headlines by activating the world’s largest AI chip supercluster, 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips (costing $3bn), to train his pet AI, Grok 3.
TL;DR: Llamas make AI go faster.
2. The new high-performance llama models signal that AI can’t be put back in its box, or rather its pen. Sporting a new llama-inspired curly hairstyle, Zuckerberg declared that AI’s future is open source, claiming it’s too important for Big Tech and Big Government to keep to themselves. Unlike big AI labs, you can’t shut llamas down because they’re free and freely replicating worldwide. The world’s knowledge, copyrighted or not, is encoded in these silicon beasts and cannot be regulated, sued, or hype-cycled away.
TL;DR 2: Llamas mean AI disruption is here to stay.
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July wasn’t all about llamas. Zuckerberg had another trick up his sleeve: Meta AI Studio. This new tool allows social media users to create digital clones of themselves. The idea? Outsource tedious social media graft to your digital twin, freeing you up for beach time or whatever floats your boat. The impact on marketing? The future of influencer marketing is ‘synthfluencers’ – synthetic influencers.
In fact, digital twin outsourcing took off in July. Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan revealed plans to let users create digital twins for boring meetings. José Mourinho licensed his digital twin for a Snickers ad. Eleven Labs resurrected digital versions of Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier, putting them back to work. For those not ready to be cloned, silicon stand-ins like Harvey the lawyer, Rufus the personal shopper, Spok the marketer, Sybill the sales exec, and Sybil (one l) the radiologist were all in the news as digital workers.
What does the proliferation of digital souls, selves and slaves mean for marketing? The jury is out, but we’re certainly heading to a future where marketing audiences will be both human and silicon. If our AI selves or stand-ins are researching, evaluating, choosing, working and buying on our behalf, then we’ll need to be segmenting, targeting and positioning to appeal to their silicon sensibilities.
So, it’s fortunate then, that we as marketers now have herds of smart llamas to help us master this brave new world of marketing. It’s going to be a wild ride.
Time to adopt a llama?
