Meta Llama
Open-source LLM family from Meta. Llama 4 is the latest generation using Mixture-of-Experts architecture. Llama 4 Scout: 17B active params, 16 experts, up to 10M token context window (longest in industry), fits on single H100. Llama 4 Maverick: 17B active, 128 experts, ~1417 ELO on LMArena, beats GPT-4o and Grok 3. Llama 4 Behemoth (288B active, still training). Natively multimodal (first open model). Fully open weights. No direct API — access via Together AI, Groq, Fireworks, Cerebras, AWS Bedrock, Azure.
Overview
| Category | Ai |
| Self-Hostable | Yes |
| On-Prem | No |
| Best For | startup, growth, enterprise |
| Last Verified | 2026-02-12 |
Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths:- cost
- customization
- security
- No first-party API — must use hosting providers
- Self-hosting requires significant GPU resources
- Not competitive with top frontier proprietary models
When to Use
Best when:- Need full control over model weights and deployment
- Building on-premise or private cloud deployments
- Want to fine-tune on proprietary data
- Need massive context (10M tokens with Scout)
- Cost optimization at high volume via self-hosting
- Need a simple managed API experience
- Don't have GPU infrastructure or budget for hosting
- Need top-3 frontier performance