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What happened to the llama family of AI models?
The
Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI)
family has evolved from a leaked research project into the industry standard for "open-weights" AI.
Developed by Meta, these models
are free for most users and can be run locally on personal hardware.
Current Status: Llama 4
As of April
2025, Meta has transitioned to the Llama
4 generation, which features "natively multimodal" capabilities—meaning it can
understand text, images, audio, and video simultaneously.
Key models in
the current lineup include:
- Llama 4 Scout: A highly efficient multimodal model supporting a massive 10 million token context window, allowing it to process entire libraries of information at once.
- Llama 4 Maverick: A 400-billion parameter model (with 17 billion active parameters via Mixture-of-Experts) designed for high-performance text and image understanding.
- Llama 4 Behemoth: A massive "teacher" model with 288 billion active parameters, setting new benchmarks for non-reasoning tasks like math and multilinguality.
Evolution of the Family
- Llama 1 (Feb 2023): Originally intended for researchers, it was famously leaked online shortly after release.
- Llama 2 (July 2023): Explicitly released for commercial use, sparking the "local LLM" movement.
- Llama 3 & 3.1 (April–July 2024): Introduced much larger parameter counts (up to 405B) and significantly improved multilingual support.
- Llama 4 (April 2025): Shifted the focus to native multimodality and extreme context windows.
Impact and Availability
The Llama
family is considered a successful "open" model, with over one billion downloads as of 2025. Developers can
download and run these models without a subscription, unlike some competitors. The models are available
through platforms like Hugging
Face or Meta's official Llama
site.
Creating a public link…
Has Meta stopped opensourcing it's LLMs?
Meta has
not fully stopped
releasing "open-weights" models, but as of April 2026, the company has significantly shifted its strategy
away from the "open-source everything" philosophy it championed in 2024.
While recent
models like
Llama 4 Scout
and
Maverick
remain available for download and local use, Meta is increasingly
moving toward a "closed" or proprietary model for its most powerful upcoming technology.
The Current Strategy Shift
- The "Avocado" Model: Reports indicate that Meta's next frontier model, codenamed Avocado (expected in Q2 2026), will likely be closed-source. This would be Meta's first major departure from the Llama open-weight tradition, designed as a proprietary, "money-making" competitor to OpenAI and Google.
- Safety & Superintelligence: Mark Zuckerberg has clarified that while Meta wants to lead in open source, it will no longer open-source "everything". Specifically, as models approach "superintelligence" levels, Meta cites safety concerns and the risk of adversarial use by state-level actors as reasons to keep certain weights private.
- Commercial Pressures: After investing over $600 billion in AI infrastructure, Meta is under pressure to monetize its AI research directly through APIs and enterprise services rather than just giving the technology away for free.
What is Still "Open"?
- Llama 4 Series: The "Scout" and "Maverick" versions released in 2025 are still available as open-weights models.
- Community Ecosystem: Meta continues to support platforms like Hugging Face and partners like Nvidia and Databricks for hosting and fine-tuning existing Llama models.
- Licensing Realities: It is important to note that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and other purists have long argued Llama was never truly open source because Meta withheld training data and imposed usage restrictions on large companies.
Would you
like to know more about the capabilities of Llama
4 or the specific licensing
restrictions for large-scale commercial use?
Creating a public link…
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