Meta AI / Llama

About Meta AI / Llama

Meta AI is Meta's consumer-facing AI assistant, integrated deeply into WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook. Powered by Llama 3 and successor models, it enables conversational AI, image generation, and task assistance directly within social and messaging platforms. Meta has also made Meta AI available as a standalone product at meta.ai. For the hosted Meta AI product, the compliance picture for European businesses is poor. Meta Platforms Inc. is incorporated in Delaware and subject to US federal law, including the CLOUD Act. Meta's long-running conflict with European data protection authorities—including multi-hundred-million-euro GDPR fines from the Irish Data Protection Commission, and battles over transatlantic data transfers—creates substantial regulatory and reputational risk for any organisation relying on the hosted product for business purposes. Meta AI does not offer EU data residency, and user interactions may be used to improve Meta's AI models under default settings. However, the Llama open-weights models present a fundamentally different proposition. Meta releases Llama model weights under a permissive research and commercial licence (with restrictions for very large-scale commercial deployments). Organisations can download Llama 3 (8B, 70B, and 405B parameter variants), Llama 3.2, and Code Llama, and run these models on their own infrastructure—whether on-premise servers, private cloud, or EU-region cloud instances on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. In this self-hosted configuration, no data leaves the organisation's own environment, yielding a data residency score of 5, full legal jurisdiction control, and no training on user data by default. For European enterprises seeking a capable open-source LLM foundation that avoids US SaaS lock-in, Llama self-hosting is one of the most compelling options in the market. The models are competitive with GPT-4 class performance on many benchmarks (particularly Llama 3 405B), and a rich ecosystem of inference frameworks (vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp, Hugging Face TGI) makes deployment accessible even for teams without deep ML expertise. Providers such as OVHcloud, Scaleway, and Deutsche Telekom offer Llama hosting within EU data centres for organisations that cannot manage their own GPU infrastructure. The trust scores below reflect the hosted Meta AI product. Organisations evaluating Llama self-hosted deployments should treat the tool as a 5-across-the-board sovereignty story, contingent on their own infrastructure security practices.