AI Daylee

Tech

Meta Releases Llama 3.1 405B Under Permissive License

June 14, 2026 ยท From the archive, written in the Professor's voice before our October 2026 redesign from ai.meta.com

What happened

Meta published the full 405 billion parameter Llama 3.1 weights on July 23, 2024. Anyone can download the checkpoint from Hugging Face, run inference on their own GPUs, or fine tune the model with LoRA adapters. Commercial redistribution and derivative products are explicitly allowed.

Why it matters

Teams no longer need to budget for closed API calls when prototyping large language model features. Budgets shift from inference spend to hardware or fine tuning time. Developers gain full control over data handling and model behavior.

Who's doing it

Hugging Face hosts the official repository and reports more than 2 million downloads of the 405B weights in the first month. Perplexity AI has already fine tuned a Llama 3.1 405B variant for their search product and published benchmark gains of 7 percent on HotpotQA.

Try it

  1. Visit https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and accept the license.
  2. Run the command huggingface-cli download meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B to fetch the weights.
  3. Load the model in vLLM with python -m vllm.entrypoints.openai.api_server to obtain an OpenAI compatible endpoint for local testing.

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 Yinzer BS detector

    Meta Just Dropped Llama 3.1 405B and Said Take It, It's Yours

  • Karen what's the catch

    EXCUSE ME?! Meta just dropped a 405 billion parameter model you can download and sell products with for FREE

  • The Anchor what could go wrong

    BREAKING: META JUST OPENED THE GATES TO A 405 BILLION PARAMETER MONSTER... YOUR JOB IS ALREADY GONE

  • The Boss hype translator

    Llama 3.1 405B Just Dropped Open Source and I Already CC'd the Whole Company