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LLM Index

GPTNeo vs. Llama

A side-by-side comparison of release history, capabilities, licensing and model sizes.

Attribute GPTNeo Llama
Developer EleutherAI, Together Meta
Current generation – Llama 4
Initial release 2021-03-21 2023-02-24
Instruct tuned No Yes
Coding No Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Apache 2.0 Llama Community License
Model sizes 1.3B, 2.7B 109B (17B active), 400B (17B active)
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GPTNeo

GPTNeo is a model released by EleutherAI to try and provide an open source model with capabilities similar to OpenAI's GPT-3 model. One of the earliest such models, GPTNeo was trained on The Pile, Eleuther's corpus of web text.

Llama

Llama is Meta's open-weight model family. Llama 4 was its last major generation; Meta's active assistant-model development has shifted to Muse.

Meta introduced LLaMA in February 2023, helping catalyze the modern open-weight model ecosystem. Llama 2 added commercial use and chat tuning, while the Llama 3 series improved scale, multilingual support, and instruction following. Llama 4, released in April 2025, introduced native multimodality and a mixture-of-experts architecture. Meta subsequently shifted its actively promoted assistant-model line to the proprietary Muse family, but Llama models remain widely used and deployed.

Further reading

Compare other models

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