Llama vs. OpenLLaMA

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

OpenLLaMA is an effort from OpenLM Research to offer a non-gated version of LLaMa that can be used both for research and commercial applications. As of June 2023, the model is still training, with 3B, 7B, and 13B parameter models available.

Initial release: 2023-04-28

Reference

https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama

Further Reading

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35798888