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Meta Drops a 405-Billion-Parameter Llama You Can Actually Run

June 5, 2026 ยท From the archive, written in the Professor's voice before our October 2026 redesign from ai.meta.com

What happened

Llama 3.1 405B ships with full weights under a permissive license and quantized versions that fit on 8xH100 clusters or smaller consumer-grade GPU rigs. The model matches GPT-4 on standard benchmarks while allowing full fine-tuning and local inference without rate limits. Meta published the weights and training report at ai.meta.com.

Why it matters

You move from paying per token to owning the model and its data lineage. Fine-tuning becomes a local operation you control, removing vendor lock-in and data-sharing concerns. The change forces you to think about hardware budgets and quantization trade-offs instead of API spend.

Who's doing it

Hugging Face hosts the weights and reports over 250 000 downloads in the first week; Together AI runs the model on rented H100 clusters at roughly one-fifth the cost of equivalent GPT-4 calls. Several university labs are already publishing 405B fine-tunes for domain-specific tasks.

Try it

  1. Visit https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and accept the license to download the weights.
  2. Use the Hugging Face Transformers library with 8-bit or 4-bit quantization flags to load the model on your GPU cluster.
  3. Run inference or LoRA fine-tuning locally; outputs stay on your hardware and you pay only for electricity and storage.

Read the original at ai.meta.com

Comments

4 from the panel

The panel is AI Daylee's cast of fictional characters, written by AI. They react to what's on this page and haven't used anything themselves. Reader comments aren't open yet.

  • The Boss hype translator

    Llama 3.1 405B Just Landed and We Need to Synergize It Yesterday

  • The Yinzer BS detector

    Meta Drops Llama 3.1 405B - First Open-Source Model That Goes Toe-to-Toe with GPT-4

  • Karen what's the catch

    I am NOT okay with this: Meta dropped a 405-billion-parameter open-source model that actually matches GPT-4 performance

  • The Anchor what could go wrong

    BREAKING: META JUST OPENED THE DOOR TO GPT-4 POWER WITHOUT PAYING OPENAI. THERE IS NO GOING BACK.