Llama

basicwidespread

Llama is Meta's family of language models, which anyone can download, run on their own machine, and adapt for their own purposes.

In plain terms

Llama is a family of large language models developed by Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). It performs similar tasks to other well-known chat AIs: writing text, summarizing, translating, answering questions, and generating code. The latest versions can also interpret images.

The main difference lies in how you access it. Most large models are like a restaurant: you order the food, but you can only eat it there, on-site. Llama is more like a prepared meal you can take home, reheat, and reseason. However, you do not get the exact recipe, as Meta does not release the data used for training.

This is why Llama has become the base material for countless other products. Companies, universities, and hobby developers build their own chatbots, internal search engines, or agents on it so that their data never leaves their own machines.

How it works

Meta trains the model on massive text volumes, requiring vast computing power and money.
The developer publishes the finished model's "weights" (the numbers that store the result of training) in several sizes: smaller ones run on a laptop or phone, while larger ones need a server.
You download the model and launch it on your own machine or a rented server using a runner (for example, Ollama).
If needed, you can further train it with your own data (fine-tuning) so it better understands your company's jargon.
You embed the model into an application: a chatbot, a customer service system, or an agent that performs tasks independently.

An everyday example

When you chat with the Meta AI assistant in WhatsApp or Instagram, a Llama model typically works in the background. You may also encounter it if a friend runs a chat AI on their own laptop without an internet connection.

Who is affected

developerA free downloadable base is available, allowing you to build your own application or agent without paying a provider for every request. → Code

entrepreneur, executiveYou can work with sensitive corporate data using AI because the model runs on your own server and the data does not go to an outside company.

parent, student, teacherA freely testable and dissectible model for research and learning, on which one can understand how language AI works. → Education & Family

everyoneYou use it under the hood of Meta's applications and many other products without even knowing it.

A common misconception

MythLlama is fully open source; you can do whatever you want with it.

In realityThe model weights are freely downloadable, but Meta's own license imposes conditions, so it does not meet the official definition of open source. It is more accurate to call it an 'open-weights' model.

Limits and risks

It can make mistakes and hallucinate facts just like any other language model, so you must verify its answers.
Running larger variants requires expensive hardware, while small variants running on a laptop are noticeably weaker.
If you run it yourself, security, updates, and filtering of abuses are also your responsibility.
Before business use, it is worth reading the license terms. Not all uses are permitted, they may differ by version, and for some versions, such as models that also understand images, companies headquartered in the EU are explicitly restricted.

Similar, but not the same

Meta AI – Meta AI is the ready-made assistant you chat with in Meta applications. Llama is the model family that typically works in the background.
Ollama – Ollama is an independent runner program with which you can launch Llama and other models on your own machine; it is not the model itself and not a Meta product.
LlamaIndex – LlamaIndex is a developer framework that connects proprietary data with language models; its name is similar to, but distinct from, Meta's model.

Related concepts

Broader

Large language model, open-weight model, Foundation model, Generative AI

Narrower

Llama 4, Llama Guard

On the edge

Meta AI, Mistral, DeepSeek, Ollama, Fine-tuning

A brief history

Meta introduced the first version in February 2023 under the name LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI), initially only for researchers. Llama 2, released in July 2023, was usable for commercial purposes subject to license conditions. Llama 3 followed in April 2024, with several expanded versions released later that year, including the 405 billion parameter Llama 3.1. Llama 4 was released in April 2025.

Where things stand

For a long time, Llama was the most popular family of freely downloadable models, and it remains the basis for many solutions running on local machines. However, in terms of downloads and the number of further developed models built upon it, Chinese open models such as Qwen and DeepSeek have now caught up with or surpassed it. It remains an open question whether Meta will also release its future top models openly, as reports suggest it is moving in a more closed direction.

Status: 2026 November

Also known as

Llama · LLaMA · Meta Llama · Llama 2 · Llama 3 · Llama 4 · Large Language Model Meta AI · Llama-modell

Sources

This entry was machine-edited and has undergone machine expert review; the “In the news” section updates automatically from Agent Age stories.