---
id: "2023-02-24-llama"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-02-24-llama/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2023-02-24"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-02-24-llama/

# 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Introducing LLaMA (Meta AI)](https://ai.meta.com/blog/large-language-model-llama-meta-ai/) (ai.meta.com, official)
2. [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13971) (arxiv.org, paper)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2023-07-18: [Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-07-18-llama-2/index.md)
- 2022-03-29: [DeepMind's Chinchilla revises scaling laws toward more data](https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-03-29-chinchilla/index.md)