Llama vs. WizardLM

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

WizardLM is a variant of LLaMA trained with complex instructions.

WizardLM is a LLM based on LLaMA trained using a new method, called Evol-Instruct, on complex instruction data. By using AI to "evolve" instructions, WizardLM outperforms similar LLaMA-based LLMs trained on simpler instruction data. On the 6th of July, 2023, WizardLM V1.1 was released with significantly improved performance, and as of 15 April 2024, WizardLM-2 was released with state-of-the-art performance.

Initial release: 2023-05-26

Reference

https://github.com/nlpxucan/WizardLM

Further Reading

• https://huggingface.co/WizardLM
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12244
• https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/142iw20/official_wizardlm30b_v10_released_can_beat/