Meta’s open-source AI model, Llama, has hit 1 billion downloads, marking a major milestone for the company’s push into generative AI. The rapid growth—jumping from 650 million downloads in December 2024—highlights Llama’s growing role in AI applications, from independent developers experimenting with local models to enterprises integrating it into production systems. However, despite its success, Meta still faces challenges ranging from copyright lawsuits to increasing competition in the AI space.
Key Points:
- Llama is being used by major companies like Spotify, AT&T, and DoorDash, despite licensing restrictions that limit commercial flexibility.
- Meta faces regulatory and legal hurdles, including AI copyright lawsuits and data privacy concerns in Europe.
- Future updates include multimodal models and reasoning capabilities, positioning Llama to compete with OpenAI and DeepSeek.
While technically Meta's license isn't truly open-source—it maintains some commercial restrictions that have drawn criticism from developers—the company's approach has nonetheless attracted major enterprise adopters. Llama has gained traction in both research and commercial settings, powering Meta’s AI assistant across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp while also being integrated into third-party applications.
Companies such as Spotify, AT&T, and DoorDash have deployed Llama-based models in production environments, capitalizing on Meta’s free-to-use ecosystem. Additionally, communities on platforms like Hugging Face and r/LocalLlama have contributed to the model’s growing ecosystem through fine-tuning and derivative models.
Llama has now been downloaded over 1 Billion times!
— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta) March 18, 2025
A note to:
The researchers at Meta training these models — and those building on the research in other labs.
The developers and enthusiasts on r/LocalLlama, @huggingface and more; experimenting with new models and creating…
However, Llama’s rise hasn’t been without controversy. The model sits at the center of a copyright lawsuit alleging that Meta trained on copyrighted books without permission. In Europe, concerns over data privacy have led regulators in multiple countries to delay or even block Llama’s deployment.
Perhaps more concerning for Meta's AI ambitions, Llama has recently been outperformed by competing models like DeepSeek's R1, developed by Chinese AI lab DeepSeek. Reports suggest Meta has established "war rooms" to apply DeepSeek's innovations to Llama's development roadmap, highlighting the intensely competitive nature of the AI model landscape.
Meta isn't slowing down its AI investments. The company has indicated it will spend up to $80 billion on AI-related projects this year, with plans to release several new Llama models in the coming months. These include "reasoning" models similar to OpenAI's o3-mini, along with models featuring native multimodal capabilities that can work with different types of data simultaneously.
Zuckerberg has also hinted at upcoming "agentic" features, suggesting future Llama models may be able to take autonomous actions—a capability that could significantly expand the practical applications of Meta's AI offerings.
The billion-download milestone for Llama represents more than just a numerical achievement. It signals that open, accessible AI development may be winning mindshare against the closed, proprietary approaches championed by some of Meta's competitors. In the rapidly evolving AI industry, Meta's success with Llama suggests that collaboration might be just as powerful a force as competition.