About Llama 4
Meta Llama 4 represents the pinnacle of open-source AI development, delivering native multimodal capabilities that seamlessly combine advanced text and image processing with industry-leading context lengths up to 10M tokens. Released in 2025, this groundbreaking foundation model features two primary variants: Scout for general applications and Maverick with 17B active parameters across 128 experts (400B total parameters) optimized for mobile-first development and edge computing. The model excels across multiple domains including coding, mathematical reasoning, multilingual tasks, and long-context document processing, competing directly with proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash. Llama 4 incorporates built-in AR/VR spatial awareness support and includes Llama Guard 4 for safety, making it ideal for developers building sophisticated AI applications without vendor lock-in. With complete commercial licensing freedom and no API dependencies, Llama 4 empowers researchers, enterprises, and independent developers to deploy cutting-edge AI solutions while maintaining full control over their infrastructure and data privacy.
Best For
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Completely free with commercial licensing
- State-of-the-art multimodal capabilities
- Massive 10M token context length
- Efficient edge device deployment
- Outperforms GPT-4o in coding benchmarks
- Built-in AR/VR spatial awareness
Cons
- Requires significant compute resources for self-hosting
- No official user interface provided
- Context quality degrades at maximum lengths
Pricing Plans
- Complete model weights
- Commercial license included
- All model variants
- Llama Guard 4 safety model
- Together AI integration
- Groq infrastructure
- AWS Bedrock deployment
- Azure hosting
Prices as of Jan 2026. Check official site for current pricing.
What People Say
I actually find it quite great, better than 3.3 70B, and it's really optimized for CPU inference.
The performance of scout is really good. Anecdotally it seems to be answering things at least as good as Llama 3.3 70b or Qwen 2.5 72b, at higher speeds.
I strongly advise against using Llama 4 for coding. Perhaps it might be worth trying for long text translation or multimodal tasks.
They seem bad at everything I've tried. Worse than 20-30Bs even and completely lack the most general of knowledge.
I found it actually performed quite well for a challenging use case: reading hiking notes and providing reversed notes for those walking the trail.
FAQ
What is Llama 4?
Access Meta's most advanced open-source multimodal AI model with native text and image processing capabilities. Llama 4 offers massive context lengths, commercial licensing, and high efficiency on edge devices.
How much does Llama 4 cost?
Free (Self-Hosted) • $0.19 Cloud Providers
Is Llama 4 good for beginners?
It depends on your experience level. Check the features to see if it fits your needs.
What are the best alternatives to Llama 4?
Popular alternatives include Qwen 3, Mistral AI, DeepSeek.
