Llama is Meta's family of open-source large language models, released under a permissive license that allows commercial use. The current generation (Llama 3.1/3.3) includes models from 8B to 405B parameters. Llama 3.1 405B is competitive with GPT-4-class models on many benchmarks. The 70B variant is the sweet spot: frontier-adjacent quality at a fraction of the cost to run.
Why Llama matters: it's the foundation for almost all serious self-hosted and fine-tuned AI deployments. When companies need full data control (HIPAA, government, financial services), when they need to fine-tune extensively on proprietary data, or when they're at the scale where per-token API costs exceed GPU infrastructure costs, Llama is usually the starting point.
Practical deployment: Llama models are most commonly served with vLLM (production-grade inference server), Ollama (local development), or llama.cpp (CPU-friendly). Quantized versions (GGUF 4-bit) run Llama 3.1 70B on a single A100 GPU.
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