Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0280/
Availability · July 18, 2023
Llama 2
Meta released the weights openly and permitted commercial use, doing so with Microsoft as the main distribution partner.
Why it matters
A large company deliberately gave away a capable model for the first time, moving the open-weights argument from research into commerce.
The licence is not open in the classical sense: a service whose products had more than 700 million monthly active users on the release date must request a separate licence from Meta, which Meta may grant at its sole discretion, and the licence restricts applications through an Acceptable Use Policy. Open source practitioners objected to the term being used at all. In practice Llama 2 became the basis for thousands of products and for most open models of the next two years.
Event record
- Event date
- July 18, 2023
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0280
Announcement of 18 July 2023.
Related events
Earlier
- Extends LLaMA 2023
The weights are now released openly and commercial use is permitted.
- Related Stable Diffusion 2022
A second model with released weights, and a second argument about what openness means.
Later
- Related Mistral 7B 2023links to this record
Weights under an Apache licence with no restrictions on use.
- Related Mixtral 8x7B 2023links to this record
Open weights without restrictions, outperforming Llama 2.
- Contrasts A twenty-three point gap in Korean 2024links to this record
Against Llama 2 70b the Korean gap comes out at 72.07 to 48.92, while in English the two stand level.
- Extends Llama 3 2024links to this record
The next generation of the same open line, nine months later.