Llama
In plain wordsA family of AI language models from Meta, first released in 2023, whose trained settings can be downloaded and run by anyone, making them the foundation for thousands of other AI projects.
Meta's series of large language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. with downloadable weights, begun in February 2023 and the most influential early open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private. family. The original LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), at 7 to 65 billion parameters, went only to researchers who applied, but its weights leaked online within about a week, and fine-tuned offshoots such as Stanford's Alpaca and the multi-university Vicuna, and tools such as llama.cppllama.cpp, prop. n.: A free, open-source program that runs AI language models on ordinary computers and phones, without needing a powerful graphics card, by using compact low-precision versions of the models., soon followed. Llama 2 (July 2023) permitted commercial use under a custom license; Llama 3 (April 2024) and Llama 3.1 (July 2024) scaled up to a 405-billion-parameter dense model competitive with closed frontier systems; and Llama 4 (April 2025) moved to a mixture of expertsmixture of experts, n.: A way to build very large AI models cheaply: the model contains many specialist sub-networks, and for each word only a few are switched on, picked by a small dispatcher network. design with the Scout and Maverick models, though its reception was marred by a benchmark-reporting controversy and its largest model, Behemoth, had not been released as of October 2026. Because its licenses restrict the largest companies and certain uses, many argue Llama is not open sourceopen-source AI, n.: AI released, ideally with its code and details of its training data and not just the finished model, so that anyone may use, inspect, alter, share and even rebuild it. How open is open enough is debated. in the strict sense.
We fine-tuned a Llama model on our support tickets and run it on our own servers.
Origin
Developed by Meta's FAIR and generative-AI teams and announced on 24 February 2023 in Hugo Touvron and colleagues' paper 'LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models'; the spelling Llama was adopted with Llama 2. No successor to Llama 4 had been released as of October 2026, and Meta was reported to be developing proprietary models outside the Llama line.
Usage note
Meta's description of Llama as open source is disputed: it does not meet the Open Source Initiative's 2024 definition of open-source AI. See open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private..
Related
- open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private.
- open-source AIopen-source AI, n.: AI released, ideally with its code and details of its training data and not just the finished model, so that anyone may use, inspect, alter, share and even rebuild it. How open is open enough is debated.
- llama.cppllama.cpp, prop. n.: A free, open-source program that runs AI language models on ordinary computers and phones, without needing a powerful graphics card, by using compact low-precision versions of the models.
- large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.
- Meta AIMeta AI, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence research group of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, known for the PyTorch software and the Llama models. It is also the name of Meta's chatbot.
- QwenQwen, prop. n.: A family of AI language models from the Chinese company Alibaba, many free to download, which by 2025 had become the most popular starting point for other people's open AI models.
- DeepSeek-R1DeepSeek-R1, prop. n.: A free, downloadable AI reasoning model released by the Chinese company DeepSeek in January 2025. It matched leading American models at math and coding for a fraction of the reported cost, shaking the industry.
Sources
- Touvron, H. et al. (2023). LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models. arXiv:2302.13971.
Mentioned in
Meta AIMeta AI, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence research group of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, known for the PyTorch software and the Llama models. It is also the name of Meta's chatbot., open-weight modelopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private., DeepSeek-R1DeepSeek-R1, prop. n.: A free, downloadable AI reasoning model released by the Chinese company DeepSeek in January 2025. It matched leading American models at math and coding for a fraction of the reported cost, shaking the industry., GemmaGemma, prop. n.: Google's family of free-to-download AI language models: smaller relatives of its Gemini systems, compact enough to run on a single computer and, in some versions, on a phone., llama.cppllama.cpp, prop. n.: A free, open-source program that runs AI language models on ordinary computers and phones, without needing a powerful graphics card, by using compact low-precision versions of the models., Mark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg, prop. n.: The American co-founder and chief executive of Facebook's parent company Meta, who made it a major AI developer that released its Llama models for anyone to download., Meta Superintelligence LabsMeta Superintelligence Labs, prop. n.: A division Meta created in 2025 to pursue superintelligence, gathering all of the company's AI teams under new leaders recruited in an expensive hiring campaign., Mistral AIMistral AI, prop. n.: Europe's best-known builder of large AI language models, a Paris start-up dating from 2023 whose chatbot is called Le Chat. Many of its models are free for anyone to download and run., model licensemodel license, n.: The legal terms under which an AI model may be downloaded and used — for example, whether businesses may use it, whether changes may be shared, and which uses are banned., OllamaOllama, prop. n.: A free app that makes it easy to download and run AI language models on your own computer with a single command, keeping your data on your machine., QwenQwen, prop. n.: A family of AI language models from the Chinese company Alibaba, many free to download, which by 2025 had become the most popular starting point for other people's open AI models., Books3Books3, prop. n.: A collection of nearly 200,000 pirated e-books, assembled in 2020 and used to train several AI language models, which became central to lawsuits by authors over AI training., Llama GuardLlama Guard, prop. n.: A free AI model from Meta that checks what people type into a chatbot, and what the chatbot replies, and flags anything that falls into listed categories of harmful content., Open Source InitiativeOpen Source Initiative, prop. n.: A nonprofit group that decides what counts as 'open source' software and, in 2024, published a definition of what makes an AI system genuinely open source.