AI Reference 069
Modern Model Families
Current · Aug 2026
Primary sources linked
The Llama Model Family
Definition
Llama is Meta's open-weight language-model family, beginning with a 2023 research release and expanding into developer-focused multimodal models.
MODEL FAMILY / DIFFERENT DEPLOYMENT TARGETSFASTSMALLFRONTIER
What is Llama?
Llama is Meta's large-language-model family, first released in 2023. Unlike fully closed API-only families, Meta distributes model weights under its own licenses, allowing developers to run and fine-tune Llama models on infrastructure they control.
How the family evolved
Llama 2 expanded commercial access in 2023. Llama 3 improved scale and capability in 2024, and Llama 4 moved to natively multimodal mixture-of-experts designs in 2025.
Why Llama matters
Llama became one of the most influential open-weight model families because researchers and companies could adapt it, quantize it and deploy it outside Meta's hosted services. The license is source-available rather than identical to a standard open-source software license, so usage terms still matter.
Related terms, defined
These nearby terms are linked because they name distinct concepts that are easy to confuse with this page's subject.
Modern Model Families
Llama 4 Scout and Maverick
Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick in April 2025 as natively multimodal mixture-of-experts models. Meta describes Scout as having 17 billion active parameters and 16 experts, and Maverick as having 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts.
Modern Model Families
The Grok Model Family
Grok is the model family developed by xAI/SpaceXAI, spanning general reasoning, coding, voice and generative-media systems.
Modern Model Families
Grok 4.5
SpaceXAI introduced Grok 4.5 in July 2026 for coding, agentic tasks and knowledge work, then expanded its availability through the company's own products and integrations including GitHub Copilot.
Modern Model Families
The Mistral Model Family
Mistral AI develops commercial and open-weight language models for general generation, coding, multimodal and specialist workloads.
Modern Model Families
Cohere Command Models
Cohere's Command family is designed heavily around enterprise generation, retrieval, tool use and multilingual applications. Cohere's 2026 documentation lists Command A+ as a mixture-of-experts model with text and image input support.
Reference guide and primary sources
Wikipedia is used here as a terminology and history reference guide. Current model versions, institutional statistics and product-specific claims are also linked to first-party or institutional sources because those details can change faster than encyclopedia articles.