University wins Meta grant for artificial intelligence project

The University of Auckland won a $250,000 grant to use Meta’s large language models – a type of artificial intelligence – to help students develop foundational programming skills. 

Meta is the global technology company known for open-source large language models (LLMs) and platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Professor Paul Denny, from the School of Computer Science, travelled to Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California to collect the award as principal investigator for the project, "Developing, Supporting, and Evaluating Multilingual Code Comprehension and Prompting Activities”. 

“I’m delighted,” says Denny. “The project will help to address the emerging need for students to work productively with AI-generated code and to interact effectively with AI systems by crafting high quality prompts." 

The project will use Meta’s multilingual models to produce accessible tools enabling students from all regions to interact in their local language. Meta's grants were announced during LlamaCon, a one-day event promoting its Llama family of LLMs.