Llama (Meta)

What is Llama?

Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI) is Meta's open-source language model series. It is the most widely used open-source AI model in the world and the foundation for thousands of derivative models, fine-tunes and applications. Unlike closed models such as GPT-4 and Claude, the model weights of Llama are freely downloadable and usable for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

The Llama models

Llama has gone through multiple generations. The most recent, Llama 3, offers models in various sizes — from 8 billion to more than 400 billion parameters. The smaller versions (8B, 70B) run on consumer hardware; the larger versions require multiple GPUs. Llama 3 performs comparably to GPT-4o on most benchmarks.

How is Llama used?

Llama can be deployed in multiple ways:

• Directly via Ollama or llama.cpp — run locally on a laptop or server
• Via cloud providers — Groq, Together AI, AWS Bedrock, Azure
• Fine-tuning — customize for specific domains or styles
• Basis for new models — most popular open models are fine-tunes of Llama

Core features

• Fully open-source — weights available for download
• Multiple sizes — from small (8B) to large (405B) models
• Multimodal — Llama 3.2 also supports image processing
• Broad ecosystem — thousands of fine-tuned variants available

Advantages

• Completely free to use
• Privacy: data stays within your own infrastructure
• Customizable for any domain via fine-tuning

Disadvantages

• Requires own GPU infrastructure for the most powerful versions
• Less capable than GPT-4o and Claude Opus on the most difficult tasks

Who is it for?

Llama is ideal for developers, researchers and companies that want to use AI without sending data to external servers, for budget-conscious users and for applications requiring custom fine-tuning.