Llama Models Explained

What Open Weights Mean

Meta publishes Llama model weights for download: researchers inspect them, startups fine-tune them, hobbyists run them at home. Openness trades some frontier polish for freedom and transparency.

Sizes and Trade-offs

Small models run on laptops and phones for quick tasks; mid sizes balance quality and cost on a single GPU; the largest need serious hardware or hosted endpoints. Match size to task, not ego.

How to Choose

Chat and drafts: small is fine. Code and reasoning: go bigger or use reasoning-tuned variants. Regulated or offline needs: self-hosted Llama keeps data in-house.