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LLM Index

Llama vs. Orca

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

Attribute Llama Orca
Developer Meta Microsoft
Current generation Llama 4 –
Initial release 2023-02-24 2023-06-05
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes No
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Llama Community License Noncommercial
Model sizes 109B (17B active), 400B (17B active) 13B
Links
Website
Website

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

Orca

Orca is a descendant of LLaMA developed by Microsoft with finetuning on explanation traces obtained from GPT-4.

Orca-13B is a LLM developed by Microsoft. It is based on LLaMA with finetuning on complex explanation traces obtained from GPT-4. By using rich signals, Orca surpasses the performance of models such as Vicuna-13B on complex tasks. However, given its model backbone and the data used for its finetuning, Orca is under noncommercial use.

Further reading

Compare other models

Other Llama comparisons

Other Orca comparisons