Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license
Llama 2 (7B, 13B, 70B) and its chat-tuned variants were released free for research and most commercial use, in partnership with Microsoft, making strong open-weight LLMs available to businesses.
Key facts
- Released 18 July 2023; paper arXiv 2307.09288
- Sizes: 7B, 13B, 70B; trained on 2 trillion tokens
- Llama 2-Chat fine-tuned with RLHF
- License allowed commercial use except for services with >700M monthly users
What happened
Meta openly released a new generation of Llama models with a permissive (though not OSI-open) license.
Why it matters
Legitimized open-weights LLMs in industry and intensified the open vs. closed AI policy debate.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Meta releases LLaMA, sparking the open-weights LLM wave ★★★★★
- Llama 3.1 405B: the first frontier-class open-weights model ★★★★
- Mistral AI releases Mixtral 8x7B, an open mixture-of-experts model ★★★
- Meta releases Llama 3 (8B, 70B) ★★★
Sources (2)
- officialMeta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama (Meta)
- paperLlama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models (arXiv)
id: 2023-07-18-llama-2 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline