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Title: In 'Milestone' for Open Source, Meta Releases New Benchmark-Beating
Llama 4 Models

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/04/06/1822...

It's "a milestone for Meta AI and for open source," Mark Zuckerberg said this
weekend. "For the first time, the best small, mid-size, and potentially soon
frontier [large-language] models will be open source." Zuckerberg anounced
four new Llama LLMs in a video posted on Instagram and Facebook - two
dropping this weekend, with another two on the way. "Our goal is to build the
world's leading AI, open source it, and make it universally accessible so
that everyone in the world benefits." Zuckerberg's announcement: I've said
for a while that I think open source AI is going to become the leading
models. And with Llama 4 this is starting to happen. - The first model is
Llama 4 Scout. It is extremely fast, natively multi-modal. It has an industry-
leading "nearly infinite" 10M-token context length, and is designed to run on
a single GPU. It is 17 billion parameters by 16 experts, and it is by far the
highest performing small model in its class. - The second model is Llama 4
Maverick - the workhorse. It beats GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 on all
benchmarks. It is smaller and more efficient than DeepSeek v3, but it is
still comparable on text, plus it is natively multi-modal. This one is 17B
parameters x 128 experts, and it is designed to run on a single host for easy
inference. This thing is a beast. Zuck promised more news next month on
"Llama 4 Reasoning" - but the fourth model will be called Llama 4 Behemoth.
"This thing is massive. More than 2 trillion parameters." (A blog post from
Meta AI says it also has a 288 billion active parameter model, outperforms
GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM benchmarks, and will
"serve as a teacher for our new models." "I'm not aware of anyone training a
larger model out there," Zuckberg says in his video, calling Behemoth
"already the highest performing base model in the world, and it is not even
done training yet." "If you want to try Llama 4, you can use Meta AI in
WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct," Zuckberg said in his video, "or
you can go to our web site at meta.ai." The Scout and Maverick models can be
downloaded from llama.com and Hugging Face. "We continue to believe that
openness drives innovation," Meta AI says in their blog post, "and is good
for developers, good for Meta, and good for the world." Their blog post
declares it's "The beginning of a new era of natively multimodal AI
innovation," calling Scout and Maverick "the best choices for adding next-
generation intelligence." This is just the beginning for the Llama 4
collection. We believe that the most intelligent systems need to be capable
of taking generalized actions, conversing naturally with humans, and working
through challenging problems they haven't seen before. Giving Llama
superpowers in these areas will lead to better products for people on our
platforms and more opportunities for developers to innovate on the next big
consumer and business use cases. We're continuing to research and prototype
both models and products, and we'll share more about our vision at LlamaCon
on April 29... We also can't wait to see the incredible new experiences the
community builds with our new Llama 4 models. "The impressive part about
Llama 4 Maverick is that with just 17B active parameters, it has scored an
ELO score of 1,417 on the LMArena leaderboard," notes the tech news site
Beebom. "This puts the Maverick model in the second spot, just below Gemini
2.5 Pro, and above Grok 3, GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, and more. "It also achieves
comparable results when compared to the latest DeepSeek V3 model on reasoning
and coding tasks, and surprisingly, with just half the active parameters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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