---
id: "2024-04-18-llama-3"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-04-18-llama-3/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2024-04-18"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 3
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-04-18-llama-3/

# 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Introducing Meta Llama 3 (Meta AI)](https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3/) (ai.meta.com, official)
2. [meta-llama/llama3 (code)](https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3) (github.com, code)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2024-07-23: [Llama 3.1 405B: the first frontier-class open-weights model](https://postcutoff.com/e/2024-07-23-llama-3-1-405b/index.md)
- 2023-07-18: [Meta releases Llama 2 with a commercial-use license](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-07-18-llama-2/index.md)