---
id: "2025-04-05-llama-4"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-04-05-llama-4/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2025-04-05"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 3
confidence: medium
status: [Partly 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/2025-04-05-llama-4/

# Meta releases Llama 4 Scout and Maverick

Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick, its first natively multimodal mixture-of-experts open-weight models, with Scout offering a 10M-token context window; the launch was marred by controversy over an experimental version used on LMArena.

## Key facts
- Released 5 April 2025
- Scout: 17B active parameters, 16 experts, 10M-token context
- Maverick: 17B active parameters, 128 experts
- Llama 4 Behemoth previewed as a teacher model, not released
- Meta later reorganized its AI efforts into Meta Superintelligence Labs (mid-2025)

## What happened

Meta shipped a new MoE generation of Llama with very long context, but reception was lukewarm relative to Chinese open models.

## Why it matters

Signaled Meta's loss of open-weights leadership to Chinese labs (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi) and precipitated its superintelligence reorganization.

## 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. [The Llama 4 herd (Meta AI)](https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/) (ai.meta.com, official)
2. [Wikipedia: Llama (language model)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama_(language_model)) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2025-01-20: [DeepSeek-R1: open-weights reasoning model rivals o1 and shakes markets](https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-01-20-deepseek-r1/index.md)
- 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)