Meta Releases New Llama Model That’s Open-Source And Available For Commercial Use

Meta’s Llama model had been initially released for research purposes, but its weights had ultimately been leaked, enabling it to become the basis of dozens of open-source models. But Meta has now released a new version of Llama that’s explicitly open-source and open for commercial use.

Meta has released Llama v-2, which is open source and available for commercial use. “Llama-v2 is open source, with a license that authorizes commercial use!” announced Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. “This is going to change the landscape of the LLM market. Llama-v2 is available on Microsoft Azure and will be available on AWS, Hugging Face and other providers Pretrained and fine-tuned models are available with 7B, 13B and 70B parameters,” he added.

“We develop and release Llama 2, a collection of pretrained and fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) ranging in scale from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters,” says Llama 2’s paper. “Our fine-tuned LLMs, called Llama 2-Chat, are optimized for dialogue use cases. Our models outperform open-source chat models on most benchmarks we tested, and based on our human evaluations for helpfulness and safety, may be a suitable substitute for closedsource models. We provide a detailed description of our approach to fine-tuning and safety improvements of Llama 2-Chat in order to enable the community to build on our work and contribute to the responsible development of LLMs,” it adds.

Llama 2 has 7B, 13B and 70B parameters. It’s been trained on 40% more data than Llama 1. It had 2 trillion pretraining tokens, and has a context length of 4096 tokens.

Llama’s release could end up upturning the entire LLM space. OpenAI has resolutely kept its models closed-source, and Google and Anthropic AI’s models are closed-source too, but Llama-2 is supposedly comparable to GPT-3.5, and free and open to commercial use to boot. A free and open-source model that’s extremely capable will help researchers tinker with it and improve it in all kinds of ways, and it’s possible that these fine-tuned models could surpass GPT-4 in capability. It’s still early days — the coming weeks will allow researchers to figure out the capabilities of the model — but Meta’s launch of Llama-2 has thrown the LLM field wide open.