In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company’s “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads. That’s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 — a 153% increase over a roughly-three-month period.
Llama, which powers Meta’s AI assistant across its various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is Meta’s bid to foster a wide-ranging AI product ecosystem. The company makes the models and tools required to fine-tune and customize them available for free under a proprietary license.
Some developers and companies have taken issue with the Llama license terms, which are somewhat restrictive. Yet Llama has achieved widespread success in spite of this. Companies including Spotify use Llama models in production today.
That’s not to suggest that Meta hasn’t faced setbacks. Llama is at the center of an AI copyright lawsuit that accuses Meta of training a number of Llama models on copyrighted ebooks without authorization, and Llama’s performance has been leapfrogged by models like Chinese AI lab’s DeepSeek.
Meta is said to have scrambled to set up war rooms to decipher how DeepSeek lowered the cost of running and deploying models, so that it could apply those learnings to Llama’s own development. And Meta recently said that it would spend as much as $80 billion on projects related to AI this year, including AI hires and the construction of new AI data centers.
