Meta Drops a 405 Billion Parameter Model You Can Actually Download
Meta released Llama 3.1 405B as open weights. Teams can now download the full model, fine-tune it with LoRA adapters, and run inference on clusters of eight or more H100 GPUs without signing enterprise agreements.
Access to frontier-scale models removes the previous requirement to rent API credits from closed providers. Practitioners can now iterate locally, preserve data privacy, and control cost structures that used to scale directly with usage volume.
Hugging Face hosts the weights and has already recorded over 1.2 million downloads in the first week. Independent labs such as LMSYS have benchmarked the model at 88.6 percent on MMLU using their Chatbot Arena infrastructure.
Step 1: Visit huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and accept the license. Step 2: Run the provided transformers script with device_map=auto on eight H100 GPUs. Step 3: Observe tokens-per-second output and compare against GPT-4 Turbo pricing to calculate local savings.