7 Frequently Asked Questions About Llama | What Beginners Want to Know First
機械翻訳 / Machine-translated
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What you'll learn in this article
Llama is a large language model (LLM) developed by Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. An LLM is a type of AI that can write text and answer questions much like a human.
Its biggest feature is that it's open source. This means the AI's internals (the model weights) are publicly available for free, and anyone can download and run them on their own computer or server. As of August 2026, the latest version is Llama 4, with two publicly released models: Scout and Maverick. It's especially popular for companies that want to customize AI using internal data, or for cases where data cannot be sent to external parties.
The Llama model itself is completely free. You can download it at no cost from Meta's official website or from a platform called Hugging Face. As long as you run it on your own computer or server, there are no usage fees, no matter how many times you use it.
However, the situation changes if you use it via the cloud. If you access Llama through API services on AWS (Amazon Bedrock), Google Cloud (Vertex AI), Azure AI, or similar platforms, charges will apply based on your usage. Using these services is an option if setting up your own environment is too difficult, but beginners are recommended to first try a free local environment.
Yes, Llama 4 officially supports 12 languages, including Japanese. You can ask questions in Japanese and receive answers in Japanese, and it can also summarize and translate text.
That said, its accuracy is said to be slightly lower compared to English. If you need higher Japanese accuracy, you can use "Swallow," a Japanese-specialized version developed by Tokyo Institute of Technology. There's also a technique of writing "Please answer in Japanese" at the beginning of your prompt (the instruction text for the AI) to improve response quality. For everyday use, the standard Llama is sufficiently practical.
Llama is released under the "Llama 4 Community License," which allows commercial use for free if certain conditions are met. Specifically, businesses and individuals with fewer than 700 million monthly active users (MAU) can use it commercially without a licensing fee.
Most small-to-medium businesses and sole proprietors will have no problem meeting this condition. Conversely, if you operate an ultra-large-scale service like Google or Facebook, you will need separate permission from Meta. Regarding copyright, the rights to text generated by Llama are considered to belong to the user, but it's recommended to review the terms of service when using it for important purposes, just to be safe.
The biggest difference between Llama and other AI tools is whether they are "open source" or "closed source." AIs like ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google) run on corporate servers, so you always need to access them via the internet.
Llama, on the other hand, can be downloaded and run on your own computer or server. This means you don't have to send data to external parties, making it suitable for companies handling confidential information or for use in environments without internet access. You can also customize Llama to create a proprietary AI for your organization. However, this comes with the added effort of setting up your own environment, so it's less convenient than ChatGPT and similar tools. It's best to choose based on your intended use.
The short answer is: running Llama directly on a smartphone is quite difficult. Llama is a large-scale AI model, so it requires high-performance CPUs or GPUs and large amounts of memory. With current smartphone specs, even the smaller models would struggle to run.
However, via the cloud, the story is different. If you use Llama's API through cloud services like AWS or Azure, you can access it from a smartphone browser or app. It's also possible to install Llama on your home computer and access it from your smartphone. If you want something easy to use on a smartphone, cloud-based AIs like ChatGPT or Gemini are more suitable.
Llama is a popular tool, so there's plenty of information available when you run into trouble. The official website (llama.com) covers basic usage and download instructions. Hugging Face also has code examples and tutorials posted by developers from around the world.
Japanese-language resources are also growing, and you can find articles and videos explaining how to use beginner-friendly tools like "Ollama." If you still can't resolve an issue, posting a question on GitHub Issues, Stack Overflow, or X (formerly Twitter) will often get a response from someone knowledgeable. Simply searching an error message as-is will frequently turn up solutions from others who encountered the same problem.
Llama is expected to continue evolving. In April 2026, CEO Zuckerberg announced a vision called "Personal Superintelligence," expressing the goal of a future where everyone has their own personal AI assistant.
Llama 4 also increased the amount of text it can process at once to a maximum of 10 million tokens (approximately 7 million characters), making it possible to read through long documents all at once. Improvements in Japanese accuracy and the emergence of smaller, more lightweight models are also anticipated going forward. Given its open-source nature, researchers and companies around the world are constantly creating improved versions, so new releases and derivative models will continue to appear.
The recommended first step is to download Llama from the official website and try it out with a beginner-friendly tool like Ollama. Since it's free, feel free to give it a try.
This article is a cross-post from AI Friends.
