Llama

Meta Llama is the king of Open Weights models. Llama 4 (2025) pushes 405B+ parameters, rivaling closed models like GPT-5.

When to Use

• Privacy: Run it on your own VPC (AWS Bedrock, Azure, or self-hosted).
• Fine-Tuning: It is the default base model for fine-tuning on domain data.
• Cost: Inference on Groq/Together AI is significantly cheaper than GPT.

Core Concepts

Models

• 405B: Frontier intelligence. Requires massive GPU clusters (or API).
• 70B: The workhorse. Smart enough for most tasks.
• 8B: Runs on a laptop (MacBook M3).

Quantization