LLaMA 2Open Weight
Released
LLaMA 2 is an AI model released by Meta on Tuesday, Jul 18 2023, 144 days after LLaMA 1. It is an open-weight model — the trained weights are available to download and run.
About
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.
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Frequently asked questions
LLaMA 2 was released by Meta on Tuesday, Jul 18 2023.
LLaMA 2 was built by Meta. Develops the open-weight Llama series of models. Committed to open-source AI research.
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.
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.