Meta releases LLaMA; the weights leak online within days

Meta AI published LLaMA on 24 February 2023, a family of language models at 7, 13, 33 and 65 billion parameters, licensed for noncommercial research and granted case by case. On 3 March the full weights were posted as a BitTorrent link on 4chan and spread from there.

Why it mattered A model of roughly GPT-3 class became runnable on a consumer graphics card, and open-weight fine-tunes including Alpaca and Vicuna followed within weeks.