It was the summer of 2023, and the question at hand was whether to release a Llama into the wild.
The Llama in question wasn’t an animal: Llama 2 was the follow-up release of Meta’s generative AI model—a would-be challenger to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The first Llama had come out a few months earlier. It had originally been intended only for researchers, but after it leaked online, it caught on with developers, who loved that it was free—unlike the large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—as well as state-of-the-art. Also unlike those rivals, it was open source, which meant researchers, developers, and other users could access the underlying code and its “weights” (which determine how the model processes information) to use, modify, or improve it.
