Llama 2
Open weights you could build a business on
Latest: Llama 2 70B / Llama 2-Chat (Jul 2023)
Released July 18, 2023 with Microsoft as launch partner — the first Llama with a commercial-use license (7B/13B/70B, plus chat-tuned variants with RLHF). It made 'open weights you can build a business on' mainstream and seeded thousands of fine-tunes.
Why it matters
Llama 2 made commercially usable open weights mainstream: 7B-70B base and RLHF chat models under a license free for anyone below 700 million monthly users, launched with Microsoft Azure. It seeded thousands of fine-tunes and set the template — open weights plus a permissive-but-not-OSI license — that every later Llama followed.
Facts
- The moment 'open weights you can build a business on' became Meta's official AI strategy.
- Free for commercial use unless your product exceeded 700 million monthly active users — a clause aimed squarely at Big Tech rivals.
- Trained on 2 trillion tokens.
- Author count jumped from LLaMA-1's 14 to 68 — a sign of how strategic the program had become.
- Launched with Microsoft Azure as lead partner and a detailed 77-page safety-heavy report.
Try it yourself
Chat with Llama 2 in a Hugging Face Space ↗ Model on Hugging Face ↗ Run it locally with Ollama ↗
Lineage
Sources
arXiv ↗GitHub · llama ↗Meta AI ↗Meta Newsroom ↗