Alibaba’s cloud computing unit will offer free training, inferencing, and deployment services based on Meta’s new Llama 3 open-source model for a limited period to local enterprises and developers, Alibaba Cloud said on Monday in a WeChat post on its official account. The temporarily free solution will eliminate computational power costs for model development and invocation, according to the post, and be available on Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian, an application development platform launched last October at the Apsara Conference 2023. The move comes just days after Meta unveiled its newest foundation model last week. Alibaba’s “model-as-a-service” platform ModelScope has added Llama 3 “immediately”, the company said. [Alibaba Cloud, in Chinese]