WHAT IT IS
Llama is Meta’s large language model family, first released in February 2023 and distributed as open weights that can be downloaded and run in one’s own environment. From Llama 2 onward, Meta permitted commercial use and offered several sizes such as 7B, 13B and 70B; Llama 3.1 extended the largest version to 405B parameters. It is a pretrained base on which the community performs extensive instruction tuning and domain adaptation. Its open weights made it a default starting point for many open-source projects.
Why it matters
By releasing large models as open weights under a commercially usable licence, it made “download a base model and fine-tune it yourself” common practice and opened the open-weight camp’s direct competition with the closed frontier.
Key specs
- Parameters
- 8B / 70B / 405B (Llama 3.1 family)
- Context window
- 128K tokens (Llama 3.1)
- Open weights
- Yes
- Released
- 2023-02
Capabilities
Text Generation
Continue a passage, one word at a time
Conversation & Instruction Following
Understand intent across turns and act on it
Reasoning & Chain-of-Thought
Break a hard problem into intermediate steps
Tool Use & Function Calling
Let the model pick an API and fill its arguments
Related concepts
Transformer Architecture
Replacing word-by-word relay with a room where everyone speaks at once, so long-range dependencies are one hop away
Pretraining & Fine-tuning
Learn language first from vast unlabelled text, then specialise with little data — the most data-efficient paradigm in modern AI
Tokenization
Models do not read characters, they read tokens — and how you split text quietly sets both capability and cost
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Phi
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Command R
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DBRX
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