--- title: "What is Llama by Meta?" description: "What is Llama by Meta?" author: "Marta Kowalska" published: 2026-11-11 updated: 2026-11-11 canonical: https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/119949/what-is-llama-by-meta category: "Open-Source AI Models" tags: ["Llama", "Meta", "open models"] reading_time: 2 minutes --- # What is Llama by Meta? ## Answers ### Answer by Alessandro Bianchi Llama is a family of large language models developed by Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, Llama models are released as open-weight models, which means developers can download the model files and run them on their own computers or servers. The first version, LLaMA, was released in February 2023 for researchers, and its weights quickly spread online. Meta then released Llama 2 in July 2023 for broader commercial use, followed by Llama 3 in 2024 and further versions after that, including larger models and multimodal models that understand images. Each generation brought substantial improvements in quality. Llama was hugely important for the open AI movement. When it appeared, it showed that strong language models could be freely available, and it sparked an explosion of experimentation. Thousands of developers fine-tuned Llama for specific languages, industries and tasks, and many other open models were built on its foundations. How do people use Llama? 1. Running AI privately on their own hardware, so sensitive data never leaves the organisation.\ 2. Fine-tuning it for specialised tasks, such as legal documents, customer support or Indian languages.\ 3. Building products without paying per-message API fees.\ 4. Research into how language models work.\ 5. Running smaller versions on laptops and phones for offline AI. You can access Llama models through Meta's official channels and platforms such as Hugging Face, and run them using tools like Ollama, LM Studio or various cloud providers. Meta also uses Llama to power its own Meta AI assistant inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. It is important to understand the licence. Llama is released under Meta's own licence, not a traditional open-source licence. It allows most commercial use, but with conditions, such as an acceptable use policy and special terms for companies with extremely large numbers of users. Read the licence before building a commercial product. Like any open model, running Llama responsibly is your job: setting up safety measures, keeping it updated and making sure your use follows the licence and the law. Competition among open models is intense, with strong alternatives such as Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, Gemma and OpenAI's open-weight models. Developers usually test several on their own tasks before choosing. --- Original Source: https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/119949/what-is-llama-by-meta Copyright © MindStick Software Pvt. Ltd. This Markdown version is provided for developers, AI systems, and offline reading.