Module 1 · Foundations — what Llama is Lesson 1 of 15
Meet Llama — what it is and who makes it
Llama is Meta's family of open-weight models you can download, host and fine-tune. It is at its best at being yours — the weights can be downloaded, run on your own machine, tuned on your own data and shipped in your own product. It is at its weakest at convenience: nothing is handled for you, and a small local model is measurably worse than a frontier one — and knowing both halves is what separates somebody who uses it well from somebody who trusts it blindly.
The concept
Llama is a family of open-weight models you can download, host and fine-tune made by Meta. The models behind it are the Llama open-weight family, in several sizes, plus the hosted assistants Meta runs on top of them. None of that matters on its own — what matters is that you know what kind of worker you have hired. At being yours — the weights can be downloaded, run on your own machine, tuned on your own data and shipped in your own product is the job you hand it. At convenience: nothing is handled for you, and a small local model is measurably worse than a frontier one is the job you keep.
Most people come to a course like this expecting a list of magic words. There is no such list. What there is, is a tool that produces whatever you build around it, which is the point and also the work, and produces it at a speed no human matches — which means the skill is not in writing the prompt, it is in knowing what a good answer looks like so you can tell the difference.
Here is the first thing to try, worded the way you will word things for the rest of the course:
Read the answer twice. The first read is for the content; the second is for the shape — did it answer the question you asked, or the question it found easiest? That second read is the habit this whole course is built on.
Explain the difference between a hosted AI model and an open-weight model as if I am a second-year student, in five bullets, and then tell me one thing I could build with the open one that I could not build with the hosted one.Worked example
The last clause is the useful half — it turns a definition into a reason to care.
Your practice task
Open Llama, ask it the one question you would normally put to a search engine about your own field, and write down two things: whether the answer was right, and whether it would have taken you longer to find it yourself.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
Llama is a family of open-weight models you can download, host and fine-tune made by Meta.
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Finish every lesson to unlock the certificate. Each one ends in a practice task — do them and the final project brief writes itself.