Meta releases Llama 3 under an open license

Meta released the first Llama 3 models, at 8 billion and 70 billion parameters, on 18 April 2024 under a license permitting most commercial use. Meta said the 70B model beat comparable models, including Claude 3 Sonnet, on human evaluations across twelve use cases.

Why it mattered Llama 3 held Meta’s position as the main supplier of openly downloadable frontier-scale models, which it extended with Llama 3.1 three months later.