Meta dropped Llama 4 on a Saturday, April 5, 2025, without warning or a coordinated press cycle.

Llama's weights leaked onto 4chan and were torrented across the internet within a week of its initial release.

Llama 3 was released in April 2024, with an 8 billion parameter model suitable for consumer-grade devices and a 70 billion parameter model that closed the performance gap with state-of-the-art proprietary models.

Meta released a frontier AI model for free in 2023, allowing developers to download, run, modify, and build businesses on it without API keys, subscriptions, or permissions.

Meta's Llama model was downloaded over a billion times within two years, making it the most downloaded AI model in history.