Llama, introduced by Touvron et al. (2023), is a series of foundation models released with open weights. The first release showed that models trained on public data could match much larger closed models, and its open availability catalysed a large ecosystem of fine-tuned, on-device and research variants.
Llama is the canonical example of an open-weight model, contrasting with API-only systems like GPT-4, Claude and Gemini.