Llama vs. Vicuna

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

Released alongside Koala, Vicuna is one of many descendants of the Meta LLaMA model trained on dialogue data collected from the ShareGPT website. According to the authors, Vicuna achieves more than 90% of ChatGPT's quality in user preference tests, while vastly outperforming Alpaca. As of May 2023, Vicuna seems to be the heir apparent of the instruct-finetuned LLaMA model family, though it is also restricted from commercial use.

Initial release: 2023-03-30

Reference

https://vicuna.lmsys.org/

Further Reading

• https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-03-30-vicuna/