Meta releases LLaMA, sparking the open-weights LLM wave
Meta released LLaMA (7B–65B) to researchers; LLaMA-13B outperformed GPT-3 on most benchmarks, and after the weights leaked in early March the model seeded a vast open-source ecosystem (Alpaca, Vicuna, llama.cpp).
Key facts
- Announced 24 February 2023; paper arXiv 2302.13971
- Sizes: 7B, 13B, 33B, 65B parameters
- Trained only on publicly available data, up to 1.4T tokens
- LLaMA-13B outperformed GPT-3 (175B) on most benchmarks reported
- Weights leaked publicly within about a week
What happened
Meta published a family of Chinchilla-style efficient foundation models under a research license.
Why it matters
Kick-started the open-weights LLM movement that later produced Llama 2/3, Mistral, Qwen and DeepSeek.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- DeepMind's Chinchilla revises scaling laws toward more data ★★★★
- Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license ★★★★
Sources (2)
- officialIntroducing LLaMA (Meta AI)
- paperLLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models (arXiv)
id: 2023-02-24-llama · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline