# LLaMA 2

LLaMA 2 is an AI model released by Meta on Jul 18 2023. It has open weight.

## Facts

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Model | LLaMA 2 |
| Developer | Meta |
| Release date | Tuesday, Jul 18 2023 |
| Licensing | Open Weight |

## About LLaMA 2

Llama 2, released July 18, 2023 in 7B, 13B, and 70B sizes, was the release that created the open-weight ecosystem. Where the original LLaMA leaked under a research-only license, Llama 2 was free for commercial use and distributed openly in partnership with Microsoft Azure — a direct strategic bet against the closed-API model of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Within months it was the foundation of thousands of fine-tunes, the standard base model for academic research, and the reason tools like llama.cpp and vLLM exist in their modern form. Code Llama followed in August 2023, and the line's successor Llama 3 arrived in April 2024.

## Questions and answers

### When was LLaMA 2 released?

LLaMA 2 was released by Meta on Tuesday, Jul 18 2023.

### Who made LLaMA 2?

LLaMA 2 was built by Meta. Develops the open-weight Llama series of models. Committed to open-source AI research.

### Is LLaMA 2 open source?

Partly. LLaMA 2 is an open-weight model: the trained weights are free to download and run locally or on your own infrastructure, but the training data and code are not fully released and the license may restrict some commercial uses. It is not open source in the strict sense.

### What came before and after LLaMA 2?

Meta's previous tracked release was LLaMA 1 on Feb 24 2023, 144 days earlier. It was followed by Code Llama on Aug 24 2023.


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Canonical page: https://aireleasetracker.com/model/meta/llama-2
Full dataset: https://aireleasetracker.com/llms-full.txt · JSON: https://aireleasetracker.com/models.json
Source: AI Release Tracker (https://aireleasetracker.com). Benchmark scores are the figures published by the releasing lab at launch.