Call For Applications: Llama 3.1 Impact Grants ( up to $100,000)

Recent breakthroughs in AI, and generative AI in particular, have captured the public’s imagination and demonstrated they have the potential to help communities create a new era of economic and social opportunity, and provide individuals, creators, and organizations new ways to express themselves and connect with people.

Building off a legacy of open sourcing our products and tools to benefit the global community, we introduced Meta Llama 2 in July 2023 and have since introduced two updates – Llama 3 and Llama 3.1. These models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offer new capabilities, including support across eight languages and a 405B parameter version —the world’s first frontier-level open source AI model.

Since Llama’s release, we have continued to introduce programs intended to identify and support the use of these models for social impact, including the inaugural Llama Impact Grants in 2023 and Llama Impact Innovation Awards in 2024. These programs have solicited proposals from organizations who will use Llama to address some of the worlds’ most pressing challenges, including improving education, environment, and health care outcomes, as well as those who are already using Llama to address topics such as the delivery of public services, economic development, and sustainability.

Building upon our ongoing commitment to support impactful applications of Llama, we are excited to announce the Llama 3.1 Impact Grants.

Learn about the tracks and their criteria

Llama 3.1 Impact Grants will incorporate both an open call for proposals as well as sourcing regionally specific use-cases from a series of events around the world. Winners will be identified in both tracks.

Global Events

At least one event will be hosted in 5 regions before the end of October. These events will include hackathons, workshops, pitch competitions, and application-based demo days where Meta technical mentors will advise developers on how to optimize for building impactful applications with Llama 3.1.

Organizations participating in these global events will need to indicate their participation on their Llama 3.1 Impact Grant application and will be entered into an additional specialized track within the Grant program. While still eligible to receive up to $500,000 USD, at least one or more Organization per region will be selected from this track to receive up to $100,000 USD in order to continue iterating on their project. For those considering participating in these events and entering this specialized track, we encourage you to submit your application after attending the event.

If you are interested in participating in one of these events, please let us know by contacting LlamaImpactEvent@meta.com.

As with the first iteration of the Llama Impact Grants, we are seeking proposals from all eligible organizations with an innovative idea for how to use Llama 3.1 to address challenges in their communities. However, applications meeting one or more of the following criteria will receive special consideration:

• Showcase the newest capabilities of Llama 3.1 (e.g., multilinguality)
• Lower barriers for other developers to build with Llama (e.g., enhance features such as evaluation, data preparation, or prompt engineering)
• Address one of the following topics:
  • Economic development
    • E.g., future of work; scaled business solutions; support for small businesses
  • Science and innovation
    • E.g., climate, health, accessibility, agriculture; infrastructure support
  • Public services
    • E.g., delivery of services; translation of government resources; solving challenges for policymakers; resource allocation; migration
  • Education and skills development
    • E.g., improve learning outcomes; retraining; lifelong learning

Application Information

Eligibility

The application window is now open!

We encourage individuals affiliated with a valid business, non-profit organization, academic institution, or research institute in operation for at least one year to submit an application in keeping with the Grant program’s preferred qualifications by using this link.

Please be sure to review the FAQs below and the Terms and Conditions prior to submitting, attend one of our upcoming webinars, and reach out with any additional questions.

Selection criteria

The application will be open from August 5 – November 22, 2024. All proposals will be evaluated using a selection criteria that assesses:

• Demonstrated utility of Llama 3.1: Llama should be a fundamental component of the project or product, and its utility should be clearly defined. Preference will be given to those applicants who can demonstrate the utility of Llama 3.1’s new features, including multilinguality.
• Applicability: The proposed solution should measurably address social impact. Preference will be given to applicants who propose to address: economic development; science and innovation; public services; or education and skills development.
• Impact: The proposed solution should articulate a vision for how it impacts the broader problem space and provides social benefit. This might include how the solution works across geographies, addresses the needs of additional communities, or similar.
• Technical feasibility: Proposed solutions should evaluate the technical feasibility of the project, including the availability of computational resources, technical expertise, and time required for development and deployment; outline a robust plan for collecting, cleaning, and preparing the data; and detail the metrics and methods for evaluating the performance of the fine-tuned/ RAG model.
• Business plan: Applicants should demonstrate an understanding of the target market, including potential users and their needs. This includes presenting data, research, or other evidence of market demand and how the fine-tuned model provides a unique value proposition or solves a specific problem better than existing solutions.

Those teams whose proposals are selected as winners will be notified by April 2025. Applicants of interest and runners up may be notified by or beyond that time. Stay tuned for program updates.

For additional information, please see the Terms and Conditions, join us for an upcoming webinar, or see the FAQ below.

Deadline: November 22, 2024

Click HERE to Apply