Meta Ships Llama 3.1 405B as Downloadable Weights
Meta published the full 405 billion parameter Llama 3.1 model under an open license. Developers can download the weights and run inference on local GPUs or rented cloud instances without paying per token fees. The release includes the same tokenizer and chat template used in the hosted version.
Users must reconsider whether they need closed API calls when a comparable model runs locally. They gain control over data residency and fine tuning schedules. Cost calculations move from usage billing to hardware amortization.
Hugging Face hosts the weights at huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and reports over 250000 downloads in the first week. Independent labs have already produced 4 bit quantized versions that fit on single A100 cards.
Step 1: Go to huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and accept the license terms. Step 2: Use the transformers library command pip install transformers and load the model with from_pretrained. Step 3: Run a local inference script and observe identical outputs to the hosted API without incurring usage charges.