Drew Rom’s shutout pitching started the Norfolk Tides on their way to victory Tuesday night, and a pair of late five-run innings turned a close game into a 12-1 laugher against Gwinnett before 1,956 in the opener of a six-game series in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Coby Mayo drove in four runs, Josh Lester knocked in three, and their home runs in the eighth extended a 2-1 lead to 7-1. The drive just over the left-field wall was Mayo’s first Triple-A home run for the International League first-half champion Tides (58-31), who are 10-5 in the second half.

Rom (7-5) blanked the Stripers, Atlanta’s top affiliate, on two hits in five innings. The left-hander struck out seven and walked three.

Kyle Dowdy gave up a run in the sixth, but fellow Norfolk relievers Darwinzon Hernandez, Joey Krehbiel and Ofreidy Gomez shut out Gwinnett (39-51, 6-9) thereafter.

Stripers starter Justus Sheffield (1-4) lasted seven innings, giving up five hits, striking out six and walking two.

Norfolk went ahead in the fourth inning as Gwinnett catcher Chadwick Tromp’s overthrow of second base allowed Joey Ortiz to come home from third on a double steal. Maverick Handley’s home run to left-center in the fifth made it 2-0.

BOOM! @MaverickHandley doubles the Tides lead on a solo bomb!

Norfolk leads 2-0 in the 5th.#RisingTide pic.twitter.com/LU44CTjo38

— Norfolk Tides (@NorfolkTides) July 19, 2023

An infield single by 795-game MLB veteran Jesus Aguilar to shortstop brought in Luke Williams in the sixth with the Stripers’ only run, but Ortiz threw out Vaughn Grissom at third on the play.

Norfolk pounded reliever Joe Harvey for five runs in the eighth, including Mayo’s three-run homer and Lester’s two-run shot. It was Mayo’s 51st extra-base hit of the year, which leads all of the minor leagues. He spent most of the year with Double-A Bowie.

There it is! @cobymayox sends this one to the moon for his first career Triple-A homer!#RisingTide pic.twitter.com/iz6lVKSvJP

— Norfolk Tides (@NorfolkTides) July 19, 2023

The Tides added five RBI singles off Matt Swarmer in the ninth, thanks to Mayo, Cesar Prieto, Ryan McKenna, Lester and Handley.

The teams will play the series’ second game at 12:05 p.m. Wednesday, with Tides right-hander Justin Armbruester (1-1, 3.44 ERA) scheduled to oppose lefty Jared Shuster, who is 4-2 in nine starts for Atlanta but 2-3 with a 6.49 ERA in eight starts for Gwinnett this season.

Grove Christian Outreach Center recently celebrated the life of Mack Banks, who turned 100 years old on July 17. Banks is a lifelong resident of the Grove neighborhood of James City County. When asked for his secret to long life, Banks replied, “Lay down and get back up every day.”

By MARÍA VERZA (Associated Press)

MANZANILLO, Mexico (AP) — An Australian sailor who was rescued by a Mexican tuna boat after being adrift at sea with his dog for three months said Tuesday that he is grateful to be alive after setting foot on dry land for the first time since their ordeal began.

Timothy Lyndsay Shaddock, 54, disembarked in the Mexican city of Manzanillo after being examined on board the boat that rescued him, the Maria Delia.

“I’m feeling alright. I’m feeling a lot better than I was, I tell ya,” Shaddock, smiling, bearded and thin, told reporters on the dock in the port city about 210 miles (337 kilometers) west of Mexico City.

“To the captain and fishing company that saved my life, I’m just so grateful. I’m alive and I didn’t really think I’d make it,” Shaddock said, adding that he and his “amazing” dog Bella are both doing well.

Shaddock described himself as a quiet person who loves being alone on the ocean. Asked why he set out in April from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to cross the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia, he was initially at a loss.

“I’m not sure I have the answer to that, but I very much enjoy sailing and I love the people of the sea,” he said. “It’s the people of the sea that make us all come together. The ocean is in us. We are the ocean.”

The Sydney man’s catamaran set sail from the Mexican city of La Paz but was crippled by bad weather weeks into the journey. He said the last time he saw land was in early May as he sailed out of the Sea of Cortez and into the Pacific. There was a full moon.

Shaddock said he had been well-provisioned, but a storm knocked out his electronics and ability to cook. He and Bella survived on raw fish.

“There were many, many, many bad days and many good days,” he said.

“The energy, the fatigue is the hardest part,” he said. He passed the time fixing things and stayed positive by going into the water to “just enjoy being in the water.”

When the tuna boat’s helicopter spotted Shaddock’s catamaran about 1,200 miles (1,930 kilometers) from land, it was the first sign of humans he had seen in three months, Shaddock said. The pilot tossed him a drink and then flew away, returning later with a speed boat from the María Delia, he said.

Grupomar, which operates the fishing fleet, didn’t specify when the rescue occurred. But it said in a statement that Shaddock and his dog were in a “precarious” state when found, lacking provisions and shelter, and that the tuna boat’s crew gave them medical attention, food and hydration.

Shaddock said the tuna boat became his land and that Bella was an immediate hit with the crew. He also explained how he and the dog met.

“Bella sort of found me in the middle of Mexico. She’s Mexican,” he said. “She’s the spirit of the middle of the country and she wouldn’t let me go. I tried to find a home for her three times and she just kept following me onto the water. She’s a lot braver than I am, that’s for sure.”

Perhaps for that reason, Bella did not leave the boat until Shaddock had driven away Tuesday. He had already chosen Genaro Rosales, a crew member from Mazatlan, to adopt her on the condition that he would take good care of the dog.

Shaddock said he’ll be returning to Australia soon and that he’s looking forward to seeing his family.

There have been other stories of extreme ocean survival, but they do not all end happily.

In 2016, a Colombian fisherman was rescued after spending two months adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Three of his crewmates died. He was rescued by a merchant ship more than 2,000 miles (3.220 kilometers) southeast of Hawaii. He and the others had been fishing off Colombia’s coast when their skiff’s motor failed, leaving them adrift.

In 2014, a Salvadoran fisherman washed ashore on the tiny Pacific atoll of Ebon in the Marshall Islands after drifting at sea for 13 months. Jose Salvador Alvarenga left Mexico for a day of shark fishing in December 2012. He said he survived on fish, birds and turtles before his boat washed ashore 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) away.

In other cases, boats are found, but without survivors or are lost entirely.

More than 20,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Antonio Suarez, Grupomar’s president, said Tuesday that this could be the María Delia’s final trip because he is modernizing the company’s fleet and the boat is its smallest and is more than 50 years old.

If so, it would be a “marvelous farewell, saving human lives,” Suarez said.

___

Associated Press reporter Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON, ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER (Associated Press)

FORT PIERCE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge signaled Tuesday that December may be too soon to begin former President Donald Trump’s landmark criminal trial concerning the mishandling of classified documents, but did not say whether she would agree to Trump’s request to put the trial off until after the 2024 election.

Judge Aileen Cannon said she would issue a written order “promptly” after the nearly two-hour hearing in federal court in Fort Pierce, Florida, where Trump’s lawyers pressed for an indefinite delay of a trial date.

The sparring over setting a trial date, a routine matter in criminal cases, underscores the unprecedented nature of prosecuting a former president who is also running to reclaim the White House in 2024.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and slammed the prosecution as an attempt to hurt his campaign.

Trump’s lawyers say the Republican can’t get a fair trial ahead of the election and insist they need more time to review evidence and prepare for what they describe as a complex case.

The judge repeatedly pressed Trump’s lawyers to set some dates and a more concrete timetable, but acknowledged she understood they needed more time to review documents and footage.

“We need to set a timetable,” Cannon said. “Some deadlines can be established now.”

She also questioned prosecutors on whether there were other similar cases involving classified documents tried in such a short time frame.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which is pushing for the trial to begin in December, told the judge the case is not complex and there’s no need for a lengthy delay. They rejected insinuations by the defense that Trump was charged because he’s running for president. Prosecutor David Harbach said there was “no political influence.”

“No one in our team is a political appointee,” he said, noting that they are all career prosecutors.

It was the first time arguments were held in front of Cannon, who has been under increased scrutiny since a court ruling last year that critics said was unduly favorable to Trump. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, attended the hearing, but Trump did not. He traveled Tuesday to Iowa, where he was taping a town hall with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Trump and Nauta pleaded not guilty before a federal judge in Miami to a 38-count indictment that accuses them of conspiring to hide classified documents from Justice Department investigators that were taken from the White House to Mar-a-Lago at the end of Trump’s time in office in January 2021.

The court date unfolded hours after Trump disclosed that he had received a target letter from the Justice Department in a separate investigation into efforts by him and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Such letters often precede an indictment.

Harbach told the judge that Trump’s legal team has repeatedly suggested he should be treated differently because he’s running for president.

“He should be treated like anybody else,” Harbach said. “He is not different than any other busy, important person.”

But Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers, pushed back against the idea that this case be treated like any other. Trump’s team said it believes the circumstances to ensure a fair trial would improve after the election.

“It is intellectually dishonest to say this case is like any other case,” Blanche said. “It is not.”

Chris Kise, a Trump lawyer, asked the judge to consider the amount of attention the case was receiving and whether finding impartial jurors would be possible before an election. But Cannon said she wanted to first focus on discovery and set a concrete “road map” for the case.

Kise suggested meeting again in November to discuss scheduling the trial. As the hearing was about to end, Kise said a trial date of mid-November 2024 would be preferred.

Cannon also presided over a lawsuit that the Trump team filed last year over the August 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Cannon drew criticism and second-guessing from legal experts for granting Trump’s request for a special master to conduct an independent review of the classified documents removed by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago.

A three-judge federal appeals court later overruled that order and said she had lacked the authority for such a ruling.

___

Tucker reported from Washington and Richer reported from Boston.

By SETH BORENSTEIN and ANITA SNOW (Associated Press)

PHOENIX (AP) — A dangerous 19th straight day of scorching heat in Phoenix set a record for U.S. cities Tuesday, confined many residents to air-conditioned safety and turned the usually vibrant metropolis into a ghost town.

The city’s record streak of 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) or more stood out even amid sweltering temperatures across the globe. It reached 117 degrees (47.2 Celsius) by 3 p.m.

Human-caused climate change and a newly formed El Nino are combining to shatter heat records worldwide, scientists say.

No other major city – defined as the 25 most populous in the United States – has had any stretch of 110-degree (43.3-degree) days or 90-degree (32.2-degree) nights longer than Phoenix, said weather historian Christopher Burt of the Weather Company.

“When you have several million people subjected to that sort of thermal abuse, there are impacts,” said NOAA Climate Analysis Group Director Russell Vose, who chairs a committee on national records.

For Phoenix, it’s not only the brutal daytime highs that are deadly. The lack of a nighttime cooldown can rob people without access to air conditioning of the break their bodies need to function properly.

With Tuesday’s low of 94 F (34.4 C), the city has had nine straight days of temperatures that didn’t go below 90 F (32.2 C) at night, breaking another record there, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Matt Salerno, who called it “pretty miserable when you don’t have any recovery overnight.”

On Monday, the city also set a record for the hottest overnight low temperature: 95 F (35 C). During the day, the heat built up so early that the city hit the 110 mark a couple minutes before noon.

Dog parks emptied out by the mid-morning and evening concerts and other outdoor events were cancelled to protect performers and attendees. The city’s Desert Botanical Garden, a vast outdoor collection of cactus and other desert plants, over the weekend began shutting down at 2 p.m. before the hottest part of the day.

In the hours before the new record was set, rivers of sweat streamed down the sunburned face of Lori Miccichi, 38, as she pushed a shopping cart filled with her belongings through downtown Phoenix, looking for a place to get out of the heat.

“I’ve been out here a long time and homeless for about three years,” said Miccichi. “When it’s like this, you just have to get into the shade. This last week has been the hottest I ever remember.”

Some 200 cooling and hydration centers have been set up across the metro area, but most shut down between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. due to staffing and funding issues.

The entire globe has simmered to record heat both in June and July. Nearly every day of this month, the global average temperature has been warmer than the unofficial hottest day recorded before 2023, according to University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer. U.S. weather stations have broken more than 860 heat records in the past seven days, according to NOAA.

Rome reached an all-time high of 109 (42.9 degrees Celsius), with record heat reported throughout Italy, France, Spain and parts of China. Catalonia smashed records reaching 113 (45 Celsius), according to global weather record keeper Maximiliano Herrera.

And if that’s not enough, smoke from wildfires, floods and droughts have caused problems globally.

In addition to Phoenix, Vose and others found less populous places such as Death Valley and Needles, California; and Casa Grande, Arizona, with longer hot streaks, but none in locations where many people live. Death Valley has had an 84-day streak of 110-degree temperatures.

The last time Phoenix didn’t reach 110 F (43.3 C) was June 29, when it hit 108 (42.2 C). The record of 18 days above 110 that was tied Monday was first set in 1974.

“This will likely be one of the most notable periods in our health record in terms of deaths and illness,” said David Hondula, chief heat officer for the city. “Our goal is for that not to be the case.”

Phoenix City Parks and Recreation workers Joseph Garcia, 48, and Roy Galindo, 28, tried to stay cool as they trimmed shrubs. They work from 5 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to avoid the hottest time of the day.

“It gets super hot out here and sometimes we have to take care of the public,” said Galindo, adding he sometimes find people passed out on the grass. “A lot of these people aren’t drinking water.”

Retired Phoenix firefighter Mark Bracy, who has lived in the city most of his 68 years, went on a two-hour morning climb Tuesday, up and down Piestewa Peak, which is 2,610 feet (796 meters) high.

“I’ve been going up there regularly since I was in the Cub Scouts, but it was never this hot back then,” said Bracy. “We’ve had hot spells before, but never anything like this.”

Dr. Erik Mattison, director of the emergency department at Dignity Health Chandler Regional Medical Center in metro Phoenix, recalled a hiker in his 60s who was brought in last week with a core body temperature of 110 degrees (43.3 C).

“Heat makes people sick. Heat makes people die,” Mattison said.

“And it’s not just older people,” he added. “We’ve seen professional athletes fall ill in the heat during training camp.”

Phoenix’s heat wave has both long and short-term causes, said Arizona State University’s Randy Cerveny, who coordinates weather record verification for the World Meteorological Organization.

Long-term high temperatures over recent decades are due to human activity, he said, while the short-term cause is high pressure over the western United States.

That high pressure, also known as a heat dome, has been around the Southwest cooking it for weeks. When it moved, it moved to be even more centered on Phoenix, said National Weather Service meteorologist Isaac Smith.

The Southwest high pressure not only brings the heat, it prevents cooling rain and clouds from bringing relief, Smith said. Normally, the Southwest’s monsoon season kicks in around June 15 with rain and clouds. But Phoenix has not had measurable rain since mid-March.

“This heat wave is intense and unrelenting,” said Katharine Jacobs, director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona. “Unfortunately, it is a harbinger of things to come.”

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Follow AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

___

Borenstein reported from Washington. Follow Seth Borenstein and Anita Snow on Twitter at @borenbears and @asnowreports

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By ERIC TUCKER (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday he has received a letter informing him that he is a target of the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, an indication he could soon be charged by U.S. prosecutors.

New federal charges, on top of existing state and federal counts in New York and Florida and a separate election-interference investigation nearing conclusion in Georgia, would add to the list of legal problems for Trump as he pursues the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

Trump disclosed the existence of a target letter in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying he received it Sunday night and he anticipates being indicted. Such a letter often precedes an indictment and is used to advise individuals under investigation that prosecutors have gathered evidence linking them to a crime;. Trump himself received one soon before being charged last month in a separate investigation into the illegal retention of classified documents.

A spokesman for special counsel Jack Smith, whose office is leading the investigation, declined to comment.

Legal experts have said potential charges could include conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding, in this case Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Smith’s team has cast a broad net in its investigation into attempts by Trump and his allies to block the transfer of power to Biden in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when Trump loyalists stormed the building in a bid to disrupt the certification of state electoral votes in Congress. More than 1,000 people accused of participating in the riot have been charged.

Smith’s probe has centered on a broad range of efforts by Trump and allies to keep him in office, including the role played by lawyers in pressing for the overturning of results as well as plans for slates of fake electors in multiple battleground states won by Biden to submit false electoral certificates to Congress.

Prosecutors have questioned multiple Trump administration officials before a grand jury in Washington, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who was repeatedly pressured by Trump to ignore his constitutional duty and block the counting in Congress of electoral votes on Jan. 6.

They’ve also interviewed other Trump advisers, including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as well as local election officials in states including Michigan and New Mexico who were targets of a pressure campaign from the then-president to overturn election results in their states. A lawyer for Giuliani, who participated in a voluntary interview, said Tuesday that he did not receive a target letter.

Trump has consistently denied wrongdoing and did so again in his Tuesday post, writing, “Under the United States Constitution, I have the right to protest an Election that I am fully convinced was Rigged and Stolen, just as the Democrats have done against me in 2016, and many others have done over the ages.”

Trump remains the Republican party’s dominant frontrunner in the 2024 presidential race, despite indictments in New York and in Florida, which appear to have had little impact on his standing in the crowded GOP field. The indictments also have helped his campaign raise millions of dollars from supporters, though he raised less after the second than the first, raising questions about whether subsequent charges will have the same impact.

A fundraising committee backing Trump’s candidacy began soliciting contributions just hours after he revealed the new letter, casting the investigation as “just another vicious act of Election Interference on behalf of the Deep State to try and stop the Silent Majority from having a voice in your own country.”

Trump traveled Tuesday to Iowa, where he was taping a town hall with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The Trump indictments have proven politically challenging for some of Trump’s rivals, who must be mindful of his deep support among many of the party’s primary voters.

Asked about the letter during a press conference in South Carolina, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s most serious challenger, said he hadn’t seen it, but delivered his most forceful critique to date of Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6.

“I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on. He should have come out more forcefully,” DeSantis said. However, he added, “But to try to criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had previously criticized Trump for his actions that day, accused Democrats of trying to “weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.”

Trump, since leaving office, has increasingly downplayed the events of Jan. 6, describing the rally he held that day as a “lovefest” and “a beautiful thing.” He has also embraced defendants jailed for their alleged roles in the insurrection, including promising to pardon a “large portion” and to issue an official apology to them if he is reelected.

In June, he spoke at a fundraiser for the defendants and earlier this year collaborated on a song called “Justice for All,” a version of the Star-Spangled Banner sung by a choir of Jan. 6 defendants and recorded over a prison phone line that is overlaid with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

One purpose of a target letter is to advise a potential defendant that he or she has a right to appear before the grand jury. Trump said in his post that he has been given “a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and indictment.” Aides did not immediately respond to questions seeking further information.

Prosecutors in Georgia are conducting a separate investigation into efforts by Trump to reverse his election loss in that state, with the top prosecutor in Fulton County signaling that she expects to announce charging decisions next month.

In his post on Tuesday, Trump wrote that “they have now effectively indicted me three times … with a probably fourth coming from Atlanta.” He added in capital letters, “This witch hunt is all about election interference and a complete and total political weaponization of law enforcement.”

Trump was indicted last month on 37 federal felony counts in relation to accusations of illegally retaining hundreds of classified documents at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. He has pleaded not guilty. A pretrial conference in that case was held Tuesday in Fort Pierce, Florida, where a judge said she expected to soon decide on a trial date.

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.

More on Donald Trump-related investigations: https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM (Associated Press)

Natural gas leaked from a defective fitting at a Pennsylvania chocolate factory where a powerful explosion leveled one building, heavily damaged another and killed seven people, federal safety investigators said Tuesday as they continued to investigate the cause of the blast.

One of two leaks at the R.M. Palmer Co. plant in West Reading was traced to a gas fitting that was installed in 1982 and was determined to have fractured, according to an investigative update released by the National Transportation Safety Board. Investigators also determined there was a small leak on a natural gas fitting installed in 2021, the board said.

The older fitting, made by DuPont, had a known tendency to crack, and it was added to a federal government list of pipe materials with “poor performance histories” in 2007, the safety board said. But it was left in place during utility work two years ago and remained connected to the natural gas system.

The findings outraged lawyers for the victims’ families.

“It’s one thing to lose a family member because of some unforeseen, unknown hazard,” said attorney Robert Mongeluzzi, who has filed suit against Palmer, DuPont and UGI Corp., the natural gas utility that served the chocolate factory. “But here, this was a problem and a defect that has been known for decades, and that makes the loss and the tragedy even worse.”

About 70 Palmer production workers and 35 office staff were working in two adjacent buildings at the time of the March 24 blast. Employees in both buildings told federal investigators they could smell gas before the explosion. Workers at the plant have accused Palmer of ignoring warnings of a natural gas leak, saying the plant, in a small town 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia, should have been evacuated.

UGI, which provided natural gas to the factory complex via two mains, has said there wasn’t any utility work going on in the area, and that it detected no sudden surge in gas usage before the explosion.

Safety investigators determined that UGI replaced a service line at the Palmer plant in 2021, but kept the 1982 service tee connected to the system and fully pressurized.

“We have reason to believe that UGI was very well aware of the dangerous, defective problems with the DuPont piping, yet left that DuPont piping in place in 2021,” said attorney Andrew Duffy, who works with Mongeluzzi to represent survivors and families of victims. Noting the safety board also found a leak in the new piping, he added: “Seven people lost their lives due to shoddy materials and shoddy work.”

Civil litigation filed after the Palmer blast said older plastic pipe manufactured by DuPont and others has long been linked to failures around the country. Federal regulators said as far back as 1998 that much of the plastic pipe manufactured for natural gas service from the 1960s through the early 1980s was susceptible to cracking.

Investigators said they are looking at the gas leaks as a possible cause or contributor of the chocolate factory blast, but have made no conclusions.

“We are not at a point to say what caused the explosion,” NTSB spokesperson Keith Holloway said Tuesday.

The cracked fitting was less than two feet from other pipelines that ran between the two plant buildings, including a steam line, a condensate line and several pipelines filled with heated chocolate. Investigators said they also saw a crack in the steam line.

UGI said it’s aware of the safety board report and is cooperating. The utility declined further comment on an ongoing investigation. “Our focus and commitment remains with the victims and the West Reading community,” said utility spokesperson Joe Swope.

Palmer said in a statement that it remains focused on rebuilding and “doing all we can to help the entire West Reading community recover.” DuPont said it was reviewing the safety board’s report but declined further comment, citing the civil litigation.

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has built an artificial intelligence system that rivals the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Bard but it’s taking a different approach: releasing it for free.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company is partnering with Microsoft to introduce the next generation of its AI large language model and making the technology, known as Llama 2, free for research and commercial use.

Much like tech peers Google and Microsoft, the social media company has long had a big research team of computer scientists devoted to advancing AI technology. But it’s been overshadowed as the release of ChatGPT sparked a rush to profit off of “generative AI” tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Meta has also tried to distinguish itself by being more open than some of its Big Tech rivals about offering a peek at the data and code it uses to build AI systems. It has argued that such openness makes it easier for outside researchers to help identify and mitigate the bias and toxicity that AI systems pick up by ingesting how real people write and communicate.

“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Tuesday. “It also improves safety and security because when software is open, more people can scrutinize it to identify and fix potential issues. I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open, which is why we’re open sourcing Llama 2.”

Zuckerberg pointed to Meta’s history of open-sourcing its AI work, such as with its development of the widely used machine-learning framework PyTorch.

But the research paper introducing the new model reflects less openness than Meta has shown previously in its work to build models that require ingesting large troves of digitized writings such as books, news articles and social media feeds.

It says the latest model was trained on “a new mix of data from publicly available sources, which does not include data from Meta’s products or services,” but does not specify what data was used. It does say that Meta removed data from websites known to contain a “high volume of personal information about private individuals.”

Meta used the acronym LLaMA, for Large Language Model Meta AI, to describe the first version of its model, announced in February. It’s now dropped the capital letters for its second version, Llama 2.

Zuckerberg said people can download its new AI models directly or through a partnership that makes them available on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure “along with Microsoft’s safety and content tools.”

The financial terms of that partnership were not disclosed.

While Microsoft is described by Meta as a “preferred” partner, Meta said the models will also be available through Amazon Web Services, which is Microsoft’s main cloud rival, as well as AI startup Hugging Face and others.

Microsoft is also a major funder and partner of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Neither ChatGPT nor similar offerings from Microsoft or Google are open source.

Microsoft and Meta also revealed the new AI partnership at Microsoft’s annual event for business customers on Tuesday. Microsoft said in a separate statement that the two companies “share a commitment to democratizing AI and its benefits and we are excited that Meta is taking an open approach.” Meta already is a customer of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Microsoft also used the virtual event, called Inspire, to reveal that it will be charging businesses a monthly fee of $30 for each user of its flagship generative AI tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot, on top of what those organizations are already paying for Microsoft services.

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This story has been corrected to show the name of Microsoft’s event as Inspire, not Ignite.