LLaMA
LLaMA (original)
The leak that started the open-weight revolution
Latest: LLaMA 65B (Feb 2023; superseded by Llama 2+)
FAIR's first large language model family (7B-65B), released Feb 24, 2023 to researchers under a non-commercial license. LLaMA-13B outperformed GPT-3 175B on many benchmarks, proving smaller models trained on more tokens could win — and kickstarting the open-weights era.
Why it matters
LLaMA proved a 13B model trained on more tokens could beat GPT-3's 175B, overturning 'bigger is better' scaling assumptions. When its weights leaked a week after release, it seeded llama.cpp and the entire local-LLM movement — the open-weight era that Meta then made official strategy with Llama 2.
Facts
- The paper that turned 'bigger is better' into 'trained-longer is better' — and launched a billion downloads.
- Weights leaked via a 4chan torrent about one week after announcement (early March 2023), spawning llama.cpp and the local-LLM movement.
- LLaMA-65B was trained on 1.4T tokens.
- The meta-llama/llama GitHub repo has ~59,600 stars.
- A 13B model beating a 175B model rewrote the industry's scaling assumptions overnight.
Try it yourself
Read the paper ↗ Original repo (59k stars) ↗
Lineage
Sources
arXiv ↗GitHub · llama ↗Meta AI blog ↗