Llama 3: Open-Source Catches Up
At a glance
- Date
- April 2024
- Era
- Generative AI Revolution (2022–2024)
- Category
- Open Source
- Impact
- 3 / 5
- Organizations
- Meta
What Happened
Meta released Llama 3 (8B and 70B, later 405B), closing the gap with closed frontier models. The 405B release put near-frontier open-weight models into more developers' hands, even though Meta's licensing still sat outside a strict open-source definition.
Why It Mattered
Showed that widely released model weights could approach frontier performance without requiring an API from a top lab. It accelerated the open-model ecosystem and intensified the debate over what should count as truly open AI.
Organizations
Part of the Generative AI Revolution (2022–2024) era · Browse all open source · View all 2024 milestones