Perplexity, the newest AI unicorn

**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.