Meta · General LLM
Llama 3
Meta's open-weight large language model family that delivers near-frontier performance while being freely available for research and commercial use.
Overview
Llama 3 is Meta's most capable open-weight language model, available in 8B and 70B parameter variants with a 405B version also released. It achieves performance competitive with leading closed-source models on many benchmarks while being freely available for download and deployment. Llama 3 has become the foundation for thousands of community fine-tunes and the default choice for organizations wanting to self-host powerful language models with full control over their infrastructure.
Parameters
8B / 70B / 405B variants
Context Window
128K tokens
Architecture
Dense decoder-only transformer
Training Data
15T+ tokens
License
Llama 3 Community License (permissive)
Capabilities
General-purpose text generation and reasoning
Code generation across multiple programming languages
Instruction following and conversational AI
Multilingual text understanding and generation
Fine-tuning and customization for specific domains
Use Cases
Self-hosting production AI systems with full data privacy control
Fine-tuning domain-specific models for enterprise applications
Building on-premise AI solutions for regulated industries
Creating custom AI assistants without vendor dependency
Pros
- +Open weights enable self-hosting and full data sovereignty
- +Performance competitive with closed-source models
- +Massive community ecosystem of fine-tunes and tools
- +No per-token API costs when self-hosted
Cons
- -Self-hosting requires significant GPU infrastructure for larger variants
- -405B model is impractical for most organizations to deploy
- -Licensing has some restrictions for very large-scale deployments
- -Lacks native multimodal capabilities in base model
Pricing
Free to download and use. Self-hosting costs depend on hardware. Cloud hosting via providers like Together AI, Anyscale, or AWS Bedrock at $0.05-$2.00/1M tokens depending on model size.