Llama vs. MPT

Overview

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.

Initial release: 2023-02-24

Current generation: Llama 4

Reference

https://www.llama.com/

Further Reading

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13971
• https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/

Overview

MPT-7B and MPT-30B are a set of models that are part of MosaicML's Foundation Series. Trained on 1T tokens, the developers state that MPT-7B matches the performance of LLaMA while also being open source, while MPT-30B outperforms the original GPT-3. In addition to the base model, the developers also offer MPT-Instruct, MPT-Chat, and MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+, the last of which is trained on a context length of 65K tokens.

Initial release: 2023-05-05

Reference

https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-30b

Further Reading

• https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b
• https://huggingface.co/mosaicml