Llama is Meta’s (US) family of open-weights models, available for download on the official site and on cloud platforms. Unlike closed models, it lets you run the model on your own infrastructure, within the license terms.
What it does
- Running language models on your own servers
- Base for fine-tuning on specific data
- Text, code and, in multimodal versions, image applications
- Prototyping and testing AI without depending on an external API
Models and license
- The Llama family is updated regularly with different sizes
- Distributed under the Llama Community License, which defines commercial use rules
- Larger versions require robust infrastructure (GPUs, memory)
Pricing
- Free download of the weights (subject to the license and terms of use)
- Cost of your own infrastructure or third-party APIs that host the model
Strengths
- Full control: run it anywhere
- No dependence on a single provider for inference
- Large community and broad integrations
Points of attention
- Running locally requires dedicated hardware
- License terms limit some commercial uses
- Quality varies by model size and fine-tuning