Meta releases Llama 3 (8B, 70B)
Meta released Llama 3 8B and 70B, trained on over 15 trillion tokens, which set a new bar for open-weight models and powered the Meta AI assistant across Meta's apps.
Key facts
- Released 18 April 2024
- Trained on over 15T tokens (about 7x Llama 2)
- New tokenizer with a 128K vocabulary
- Followed by Llama 3.1 405B in July 2024
What happened
Meta openly released strong mid-sized models with a heavily scaled training corpus.
Why it matters
Showed the benefit of training small models far past Chinchilla-optimal, and narrowed the open/closed gap.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license ★★★★
- Llama 3.1 405B: the first frontier-class open-weights model ★★★★
Sources (2)
id: 2024-04-18-llama-3 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline