LLaMA 2Open Weight
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
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.