# Meta Llama 139 Hacker News commenters recommended Meta Llama and 156 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Recommended as the model family that kicked off open-weight AI and still runs cheaply on local hardware, though critics say it has fallen behind and Llama 4 disappointed. ## Why people recommend it - Pioneered open-weight models (8 comments): "Llama was great for research and propelling the opensource community but they haven't been a serious competitor in a while." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739665)) "llama models pushed the envelope for a while, and having them "open-weight" allowed a lot of tinkering" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322116)) "Real boost to the OS/OW models movement, they have been leading it for a while after that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585083)) - Runs locally on modest hardware (5 comments): "I run a quantized 70 billion parameter llama 3.1 model on my framework 13 inch laptop." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45894147)) "A local pipeline with Whisper and Llama 3 is viable now and solves the privacy issue." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727969)) "at slow-ish (10-20 tok/sec at Q4?) but OK speeds on 12 year old DDR3 ECC Xeon machine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49482447)) - Boosted research and tinkering (5 comments): "Llama was great for research and propelling the opensource community but they haven't been a serious competitor in a while." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739665)) "llama models pushed the envelope for a while, and having them "open-weight" allowed a lot of tinkering" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322116)) "for the good they did releasing Torch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models among others for free" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168148)) - Older small models remain useful (5 comments): "Llama3.1 8B might be a little too old to be directly useful for e.g. coding but it certainly gets the gears turning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091586)) "Llama 3.1 8B can do lots of things today and it'll still be able to do those things tomorrow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112743)) "Llama 3.2 3B was least-bad at "notice a pattern without sounding like a fortune cookie."" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825362)) ## What people warn about - Fallen behind competing models (4 comments): "Llama was great for research and propelling the opensource community but they haven't been a serious competitor in a while." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739665)) "Meta went from being widely respected and considered a peer with leading frontier labs to having no competitive technology." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48800842)) "these models are just so ahead of things like Qwen and Llama for the types of semi-complex non-coding tasks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45810685)) - Llama 4 was a letdown (3 comments): "Concentrating on LMAreana cost Meta many hundreds of billions of dollar and lots of people their jobs with the Lllama4 disaster." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47621968)) "The Llama 4 models were instruct models at a time when everyone was hyped about and expecting reasoning models." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466343)) "despite its poor performance and reception, some of the things they achieved technically were solid" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803456)) - License isn't truly open source (2 comments): "It's source-available, but still proprietary, under terms that (among other things) say "no competing with us, you have to buy a license for that"." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49251463)) "llama is not open source. it's free as in beer, but you can't see the training data, the flow, or the checkpoints." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769205)) - Trained on scraped data without consent (2 comments): "they were trained using data scraped at an industrial scale, contributing to degradation of the Web for humans" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45807938)) "They are, and as such they monetise the work of original authors without their consent, compensation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824413)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen-3-8-27b.md): 1173 recommend - [Z.ai GLM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-5-2.md): 1043 recommend - [Kimi](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kimi-k3.md): 931 recommend - [Gemma 4](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemma-4.md): 713 recommend - [Qwen](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen.md): 474 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Meta Llama", https://hackerapproved.com/p/llama/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).