Meta LLaMA
Also: Llama
Meta's family of open-weight AI models — freely downloadable and runnable on your own hardware without API dependency. LLaMA models are the foundation for most of the open-source AI ecosystem: thousands of fine-tuned variants, community extensions, and self-hosted deployments are built on top of them. The strategic value of LLaMA is control: you own the model, your data never leaves your servers, and there are no per-token costs. The tradeoff: you're responsible for running and maintaining the infrastructure.
In practice
Meta releases LLaMA models openly — meaning you can download them and run them on your own servers. For companies that can't send data to a third-party API for compliance reasons, or that want to customize at the model level, LLaMA is a common alternative to Claude. The tradeoff: you control everything, but you also have to host and maintain it yourself.
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