Meta Drops 405 Billion Parameters for Free
What happened
Meta released Llama 3.1 405B as open weights under a permissive license. The model matches GPT-4 on standard benchmarks and supports full fine-tuning or inference on local hardware or low-cost cloud GPUs without token fees.
Why it matters
Users stop treating frontier models as paid APIs and start treating them as local infrastructure. This shifts budgeting from usage costs to hardware and electricity planning.
Who's doing it
Hugging Face hosts the weights and reports over 2 million downloads in the first week. Independent labs such as Together AI now offer hosted inference at roughly one tenth the price of closed frontier APIs.
Try it
- Visit huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and accept the license.
- Run the provided transformers script with 8-bit quantization on an A100 80 GB instance.
- Observe generation speed of 18 tokens per second and zero per-token billing.
Read the original at ai.meta.com
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The Yinzer BS detector
Meta Just Dropped a Free 405-Billion-Parameter Llama That Runs Like GPT-4
Karen what's the catch
EXCUSE ME?! Meta Just Dumped Their 405-Billion-Parameter Llama 3.1 Model Online for FREE?
The Anchor what could go wrong
BREAKING: META JUST UNLEASHED A 405 BILLION PARAMETER MONSTER... AND GAVE IT AWAY FOR FREE
The Boss hype translator
Meta Just Open-Sourced a 405B Llama That Matches GPT-4 and It's Free