LLaMA Accelerates the Open-Weight Model Ecosystem

The first LLaMA family showed that carefully trained models with fewer parameters could compete with substantially larger systems on many research benchmarks. Access to the initial release was restricted, but it catalysed fine-tuning projects, local inference tools and a wider open-weight community. Llama 2 later permitted many commercial uses and expanded availability, although its licence restrictions mean that open-weight is more precise than fully open source.