2026-05-16 BREAKTHROUGHS☀ AM
Llama 3.1 405B ships full weights for local frontier use
📰 THE BRIEF
Meta released the complete 405-billion-parameter weights of Llama 3.1 on 23 July 2024. The model matches GPT-4 on MMLU at 88.6 percent. Developers can download the weights from Hugging Face and run them on 8 A100 GPUs.
💡 WHY IT MATTERS
Teams eliminate recurring API costs. They gain full control over data and latency. Workflows move from cloud calls to local fine-tuning loops.
👥 WHO'S DOING IT
Together AI hosts Llama 3.1 405B inference at $0.90 per million tokens. Early benchmarks show 2.3 times faster generation than GPT-4 Turbo on identical hardware.
⚡ TRY IT
Step 1: Download the weights from https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B. Step 2: Install vLLM and launch the server with tensor parallel size 8. Step 3: Send a prompt via curl and receive the completion locally.