In February of 2023, Meta released LLaMA, an advanced large language model similar to proprietary models released by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.

LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) 1 consisted of four model sizes up to 65 billion parameters. LLaMA's developers reported that the 13B parameter model's performance on most NLP benchmarks exceeded that of the much larger GPT-3 (with 175B parameters)

Whereas the most powerful LLMs have generally been accessible only through limited APIs (if at all), Meta released LLaMA's model weights to the research community under a noncommercial license. Within a week of LLaMA's release, its weights were leaked to the public on 4chan via BitTorrent.

On July 18, 2023, in partnership with Microsoft, Meta announced Llama 2, the next generation of LLaMA.

Llama 2 is not the only open-source AI release. There are other small scale LLMs such as Falcon and StableLM, the model behind the AI image maker Stable Diffusion. But these LLMs do not have a major tech company that can quickly establish developer communities. Usually when a programming framework is launched from the major tech companies, a large number of developers gravitate toward learning and exploring the frameworks, discovering innovative use cases, and establishing an accessible body of technical support.

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