Get started
LLM Index

Llama vs. Phi

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

Attribute Llama Phi
Developer Meta Microsoft
Current generation Llama 4 Phi-4
Initial release 2023-02-24 2023-06-20
Instruct tuned Yes Yes
Coding Yes Yes
Finetuning Yes Yes
Open source Yes Yes
License Llama Community License MIT
Model sizes 109B (17B active), 400B (17B active) 3.8B, 5.6B, 14B
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

Phi

Phi is Microsoft's family of compact open models designed for efficient local and edge deployment. Phi-4 is the current generation.

Microsoft introduced Phi-1 and Phi-2 to demonstrate how carefully curated and synthetic training data can make small models unusually capable. Phi-3 expanded the family for mobile and multimodal use. The Phi-4 generation includes a 14B general model and reasoning variants, plus smaller and multimodal checkpoints. Phi models are released under the MIT license and are designed for research, local inference, and resource-constrained production workloads.

Further reading

Compare other models

Other Llama comparisons

Other Phi comparisons