Meta Launches Llama 4 AI Models
Meta has introduced Llama 4, its newest series of open-weight AI models, which will now improve the abilities of Meta AI across services like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Two of the new models, Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick, are available for download via Meta’s official Llama website and Hugging Face. Moreover, the company has previewed Llama 4 Behemoth, a teacher model designed to train and guide other Llama 4 models.
Open-weight AI models are those with publicly available trained weights, allowing users to run them locally without relying on cloud APIs. While accessible, they may still have licensing restrictions on changes or commercial use.
Llama 4 AI Models: Details
During the announcement, Meta described Llama 4 as its most advanced set of AI models yet, built to support the broader Llama ecosystem. These models aim to help developers and businesses create more tailored and multimodal AI-driven experiences.
Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick are Meta’s first open-weight AI models that are natively multimodal and based on a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Below are the highlights of each model:
Llama 4 Scout
Llama 4 Scout is designed as a smaller model, using 17 billion active parameters and 16 experts. It supports a context window of up to 10 million tokens and can run on a single Nvidia H100 GPU. According to Meta, Scout showcases better performance than Google’s Gemma 3, Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, and Mistral 3.1 across various benchmark tests.
Llama 4 Maverick
Maverick is the more advanced offering in the set, positioned as a competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. Meta claims that Maverick not only performs better than these models in many benchmarks but also rivals DeepSeek v3 in reasoning and coding tasks—all while using less than half the active parameters.
Llama 4 Maverick utilizes 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts, optimized to run on a single Nvidia H100 host.
Llama 4 Behemoth
The Behemoth model acts as a teacher model and is the most powerful variant within the Llama 4 family. This multimodal MoE model features 288 billion active parameters, uses 16 experts, and has nearly two trillion total parameters. Meta asserts that it delivers leading performance in math, multilingual processing, and image-related tasks among non-reasoning models, rendering it ideal for training smaller counterparts.
Although still in training, Meta anticipates that Llama 4 Behemoth is superior to OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Google Gemini 2.0 Pro on numerous STEM-focused assessments.
Llama 4 AI Models: Availability
Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick are now available for download from Meta’s official Llama page and on Hugging Face. Furthermore, Meta AI powered by Llama 4 is gradually becoming available across WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram Direct, and web platforms.
