Llama 3
Meta's third-generation open-weight model, trained on 15 trillion tokens — over 7× more than Llama 2. The 70B variant matched or approached GPT-4 and Claude 3 Sonnet on most benchmarks while being downloadable for free with a permissive license. Followed in July 2024 by Llama 3.1 with a 405B version that explicitly targeted GPT-4 / Claude 3.5 parity.
How are Intelligence, Speed & Cost bucketed?
- Top 1%≤ 1%
- Top 5%≤ 5%
- Top 10%≤ 10%
- Good≤ 25%
- Medium≤ 50%
- Below avg> 50%
- Top 1%≥ 345 tok/s
- Top 5%≥ 237 tok/s
- Top 10%≥ 196 tok/s
- Good≥ 146 tok/s
- Medium≥ 90 tok/s
- Slow< 90 tok/s
- Freeopen weights · self-host
- Low< $1 / M out
- Moderate$1–5 / M out
- High≥ $5 / M out
Why it matters
Llama 3's release cadence and quality made open weights the structural baseline for LLM economics. Any closed model now has to justify its premium against a free open alternative within one to two quarters of release. This pricing pressure is the single biggest factor reshaping the LLM business in 2024-26.
Core Capabilities
Context Window
Availability
Pricing Model
Capability / Performance
Where this model sits relative to the middle 60% of models in the tree. All scores are 0–10 (higher is better).
What it feels like
- Major leap over Llama 2 — 70B operates in the same 'weight class' as GPT-4 and Claude 3 Sonnet at release
- Climbed to 5th place on the LMSYS leaderboard within weeks — first open-weights model to genuinely compete with GPT-4
- 128K-token vocabulary tokenizer noticeably improved encoding efficiency vs Llama 2
- Trained on 15T tokens (7x Llama 2) with 4x more code — coding feel is dramatically better
- Strong human-preference rankings vs comparable closed models in real-world scenarios
- 8B variant sets a new bar for laptop-class quality, especially after instruction tuning
Best use cases
- Open-weights production deployments where Llama 2 was the previous baseline
- Self-hosted RAG, code-completion, and chat applications under Llama 3 license
- Fine-tuning on private corpora (the open license makes vertical specialisation safe)
- Research and academic work that needs an open frontier-tier baseline
Tools to try
Not ideal for
- Frontier reasoning leaderboards by late 2025 — superseded by Llama 3.1/3.3/4 and competitors
- Multimodal tasks — text-only at this generation (Llama 3.2 Vision came later)
- Workflows blocked by Meta's acceptable-use clauses (>700M MAU restriction, etc.)