Meta releases Llama 2 with weights free for commercial use

Meta released Llama 2 on 18 July 2023 at 7, 13 and 70 billion parameters, with the weights and code free for research and for most commercial use. Microsoft was named Meta’s preferred partner, and the models were distributed through Azure, Amazon Web Services and Hugging Face.

Why it mattered A large laboratory had chosen to publish commercially usable weights at this scale rather than having them leak, and the open-weight work that began with the LLaMA leak grew from there.