Llama 2: Meta Opens the Floodgates

Impact

What Happened

Meta released Llama 2, a family of widely available large language models (7B, 13B, 70B parameters) distributed as open weights under a custom license that allowed broad commercial use. While not open-source in the strict OSI sense, it gave companies and researchers access to a frontier-quality model they could run, customize, and deploy themselves.

Why It Mattered

Transformed the LLM landscape by making self-hosted, customizable large models a mainstream option. Thousands of fine-tunes appeared within weeks, and the release forced a rethinking of the API-only business model even if the licensing debate over 'open source' never fully went away.

Key People

Mark Zuckerberg

Organizations

Meta

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