Llama
Meta's open-weight large language model family — the foundation for thousands of open-source AI applications.
Overview
Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI) is a family of open-weight language models released by Meta AI that has become the foundation of the open-source AI ecosystem. The release of Llama 2 in July 2023 as a fully open model available for commercial use was a watershed moment: suddenly, any developer could download a GPT-3.5-class model, run it on their own hardware, and modify it freely.
Meta has continued releasing stronger models with Llama 3, 3.1, and 3.2, each pushing the capabilities of openly available models closer to commercial frontier models. Llama 3.1 405B demonstrated that open models could match GPT-4 on many benchmarks. The model family spans from tiny 1B parameter models that run on mobile phones to 405B models requiring large GPU clusters.
The Llama ecosystem is vast: Hugging Face hosts thousands of fine-tuned variants; Ollama makes local deployment trivial; Together AI and Fireworks provide hosted inference. For enterprises, Llama is attractive because it can be deployed entirely within their own infrastructure with zero data leaving their environment. Meta's decision to open-weight Llama reshaped the entire AI industry.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 8 May 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Llama in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Llama is Meta's open-weight LLM family and the de facto backbone of the open-source AI ecosystem, with broad multilingual support, strong reasoning at larger sizes, and an enormous tooling, fine-tuning, and deployment community. For teams wanting data-residency control, on-prem inference, or freedom from per-token API costs, it is the default choice.
It suits developers, enterprises, and researchers who can run or rent GPU infrastructure and want to customise models. Caveats: the licence is permissive but not pure open-source (a 700M-MAU clause and acceptable-use terms apply), you carry the operational burden of hosting and safety tuning, and top-end quality still trails the best closed frontier models on the hardest tasks. There is no first-party hosted API from Meta — access is via third-party hosts.
Notable facts
- The Llama 1 model weights were leaked on 4chan within days of being shared with researchers — accidentally accelerating open-source AI adoption by months.
- Meta's Llama 3.1 405B was the first openly available model to match GPT-4 on standard benchmarks, proving that open-weight models could reach frontier performance.
- Llama models power over 25,000 fine-tuned variants on Hugging Face, making it the most forked AI model in history.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Llama's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Llama unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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