Perplexity doubles its valuation shortly after its Series B with a Series B-1 funding round. Significant developments around Llama 3 include context length extension to 16K tokens, new multimodal LLaVA models outperforming Llama 2, and fine-tuning improvements like QDoRA surpassing QLoRA.

The Llama-3-70B model is praised for instruction following and performance across quantization formats. Phi-3 models by Meta AI released in multiple sizes show competitive benchmark results, with the 14B model achieving 78% on MMLU and the 3.8B model nearing GPT-3.5 performance.