Meta Releases 405 Billion Parameter Llama 3.1 as Open Weights
Meta published the full weights for Llama 3.1 405B. The model matches or exceeds GPT-4 on standard benchmarks and runs on single H100 GPUs or consumer 8x RTX 4090 rigs. Users avoid per-token API charges and proprietary rate limits.
You stop treating frontier models as black-box services. You gain the option to fine-tune, quantize, and serve the model yourself. This changes budgeting from recurring API spend to one-time hardware cost.
Hugging Face hosts the weights at https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and reports over 120,000 downloads in the first week. Independent labs have already published 4-bit GGUF versions that fit in 220 GB VRAM.
Step 1: Visit https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and accept the license. Step 2: Run `huggingface-cli download meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B --local-dir ./llama405b`. Step 3: Launch with vLLM using `python -m vllm.entrypoints.openai.api_server --model ./llama405b` to obtain an OpenAI-compatible endpoint on your hardware.