Llama
Meta's open-weight LLM family that serves as foundation for thousands of fine-tuned models and has democratized open-source AI.
Llama is Meta's open-weight LLM family – foundation for thousands of fine-tuned models and standard for self-hosted enterprise AI.
Explanation
Llama evolution: Llama 1 (2023, leak), Llama 2 (official open weight), Llama 3 (2024, up to 70B). Basis for: Alpaca, Vicuna, CodeLlama, and hundreds of specialized models. License allows commercial use.
Marketing Relevance
Llama enables self-hosting: Full data control, no API costs, GDPR compliance. Basis for custom marketing models without vendor lock-in.
Example
An e-commerce company fine-tunes Llama 3 on product data: Own chatbot perfectly informed about inventory, runs on own servers.
Common Pitfalls
Self-hosting requires ML expertise. Not quite as strong as GPT-4. License has restrictions at 700M+ MAU.
Origin & History
Llama 1 (Feb 2023) was leaked and started the open LLM revolution. Llama 2 (July 2023) was officially open weight. Llama 3 (April 2024, up to 405B) reached GPT-4 level.
Comparisons & Differences
Llama vs. GPT-4
Llama is open weight (self-hostable, no API costs); GPT-4 is closed source with API access.
Llama vs. Mixtral
Llama is dense model (all parameters active); Mixtral uses MoE (Mixture of Experts) for efficiency.