Llama, Mistral and Qwen Overview
The three big open-weight model families: licenses, sizes, and what each is good at.
Why Open Source?
Open-weight models give you:
- No per-token API cost
- Data privacy — model runs on your hardware
- Customization (fine-tuning) at any scale
- No vendor lock-in
Cost: engineer hours, GPU bills, and usually worse quality at the frontier.
Llama Family (Meta)
- Released 2023-2025 in sizes 1B to 405B
- Llama 3.x is highly capable; 8B competes with mid-tier closed models
- Community license (permits commercial use under conditions)
- Huge ecosystem; most fine-tunes are Llama-derived