Names, versions and owners change fast. Checked October 2026.
In plain words
Llama is not an app. It is a family of large language models made by Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. What made Llama stand out is that Meta lets people download the model itself.
Most famous models, such as GPT, live only on their maker's servers. You use them through an app and never hold the model. Llama's trained numbers, called weights, are published. Developers can run them on a laptop, a company server or any cloud, and adapt them for their own needs. This is called open weights.
The first Llama came out in February 2023, and new generations followed. Meta AI, the assistant inside Meta's apps, was first built on Llama; Meta later moved it to its newer Muse models, which it launched in April 2026 as closed models. The box above shows where Llama stands today.
Everyday example
A recipe book versus a restaurant
A restaurant serves you its famous biryani, but the recipe stays in its kitchen. You can only order. Llama is more like a published recipe book. Anyone can take it home, cook it in their own kitchen, add more chilli or swap the rice, and serve it to their own guests. You need your own stove and ingredients, which for Llama means your own computer power.
Where the example breaks: A recipe tells you every step. Open weights give you the finished model but not the full training data or every detail of how it was made, and the licence still sets some rules on use.
Latestas of October 2026
- Latest Llama release
- Llama 4 (Scout and Maverick), April 2025; Meta's developer site listed no newer Llama model in October 2026
- Meta's newest models
- The Muse family from Meta Superintelligence Labs, starting with the closed Muse Spark (8 April 2026), which powers Meta AI; Meta released Muse Spark Open, with downloadable weights, on 15 October 2026
- Status
- Meta said in April 2026 that existing Llama models will continue to be available as open source
These details change often. The rest of this page explains what it is, which stays true.
How it actually works
"Downloading a model" means getting the file of numbers that is the trained model.
What you actually download
A Llama model is a set of files holding billions of parameters: the numbers learned during training. Software loads them and runs inference, turning your prompt into a reply on your own hardware.
Sizes to fit the machine
Llama comes in sizes from a few billion to hundreds of billions of parameters. Small ones fit on a good laptop, especially after quantization squeezes the numbers. Large ones need a server full of GPUs.
A licence, not a free-for-all
Llama comes under Meta's own community licence with an acceptable-use policy. Very large companies need separate permission. That is why many experts call it open weights rather than open source.
- Made by
- Meta
- First released
- February 2023 (LLaMA, for researchers); Llama 2 with a commercial licence in July 2023
- Llama 4
- Released April 2025 in Scout and Maverick versions, built as a mixture of experts
- Where people get it
- Meta's site and model hubs such as Hugging Face
Other well-known open-weight families include DeepSeek, Mistral and Google's Gemma.
Questions people ask
Is Llama the same as Meta AI?
No. Llama is the model family. Meta AI is the assistant inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Meta AI was first built on Llama technology, and Meta later moved it to its newer Muse models, launched in April 2026 as closed models.
Is Llama open source?
Meta calls it open, and anyone can download the weights. But the licence has usage rules and limits for very large companies, so groups such as the Open Source Initiative say it does not meet the open-source definition. "Open weights" is the more exact term.
Can you run Llama on your own computer?
Yes, the smaller versions. With free tools you can download a Llama model and chat with it offline on a modern laptop. Larger versions need powerful GPUs, usually in a data centre or cloud.
Is Meta still making Llama models?
In April 2026 Meta launched a new, closed model line for its assistant and said existing Llama models would stay available as open source. Whether new Llama versions follow is up to Meta; the box above shows the latest release.