LlamaMeta's open family of large language models — released weights that sparked an open-source AI wave. 3 closed much of the gap with closed APIs like GPTGenerative Pre-trained Transformer — OpenAI's family of large language models from GPT-1 through GPT-5.-4 and Claude — fueling local inferenceRunning a trained model to produce predictions — as opposed to the training phase that learns weights. tools (Ollama, LM Studio) and fine-tuningAdapting a pre-trained model to a specific task with additional training on a smaller dataset. pipelines. The 405B variant followed later, but the April release reset expectations for open-model quality.

LlamaMeta's open family of large language models — released weights that sparked an open-source AI wave. 3 made frontier-class open weights the default choice for self-hosted AI.

Competitive open models reduced vendor lock-in for startups and researchers.