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Latest / Frontier models and safety

Model releaseFrontierUSConfirmed

Meta releases Llama 2 weights free for research and commercial use

See how this story connects

Source: Meta: Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of LlamaAlso reported by arXiv: Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models

Meta released Llama 2 on 18 July 2023, publishing model weights and starting code for pretrained and chat-tuned versions from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. The models are free for research and commercial use under a licence with an acceptable use policy. Microsoft was named preferred partner, with the models on Azure, AWS and Hugging Face.

Why it matters

Companies could build on downloadable weights near the leading closed models, and the open-weights question entered every frontier policy debate that followed, including the US executive order’s request for advice on it.

When
18 Jul 2023
ID
WTA-N-2023-0027
Who
Meta, Microsoft

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from Meta and the reporting credited above. Checked against the source on 9 Oct 2026.

Read the original at Meta

Source copy: download the page as saved on 18 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextMeta releases Llama 3.1 405B as open weights, trained on over 16,000 H100 GPUs

Cite this story

WTA-N-2023-0027: “Meta releases Llama 2 weights free for research and commercial use.” wheresthe.ai, 18 Jul 2023. https://wheresthe.ai/d/meta-llama-2-open-release-2023-07/ (source: Meta: Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama).

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