Llama
A family of open-weight large language models released by Meta. Llama models are available for download and customization, making them the most widely adopted open-source LLM family.
Why It Matters
Llama democratized access to powerful LLMs. Its open release changed the industry dynamics, proving open models can rival proprietary ones.
Example
A startup downloading Llama 3 70B, fine-tuning it on their domain data, and deploying it on their own infrastructure — owning the model without API dependency.
Think of it like...
Like Android being open-source — it gave everyone access to smartphone technology that was previously only available through Apple's closed ecosystem.
Related Terms
Open Source AI
AI models and tools released with open licenses that allow anyone to use, modify, and distribute them. Open-source AI democratizes access and enables community-driven improvement.
Foundation Model
A large AI model trained on broad data at scale that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. Foundation models serve as the base upon which specialized applications are built.
Fine-Tuning
The process of taking a pre-trained model and further training it on a smaller, domain-specific dataset to specialize its behavior for a particular task or domain. Fine-tuning adjusts the model's weights to improve performance on the target task.
Hugging Face
The leading open-source platform for sharing and discovering AI models, datasets, and applications. Hugging Face hosts the Transformers library and a community hub with thousands of pre-trained models.