Question 1

What is Llama 3.1 8B?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B is a large language model from Meta, released on 23 July 2024. Tiny but capable; serves at >500 tok/s on Groq.

Question 2

When was Llama 3.1 8B released?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B was released by Meta on 23 July 2024.

Question 3

How much does Llama 3.1 8B cost?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B costs $0.06 per 1 million input tokens and $0.06 per 1 million output tokens via Meta’s API. At a typical 3:1 input/output ratio the blended cost works out to about $0.06 per 1M tokens.

Question 4

How smart is Llama 3.1 8B?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B scores 44 out of 100 on our intelligence index — a budget-tier composite of MMLU, MMLU Pro, GPQA, MATH and HumanEval benchmark scores. That places it #22 of 22 language models we track.

Question 5

What is the context window of Llama 3.1 8B?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B has a 128k-token context window — roughly 96,000 words of text. That’s what you can fit into a single request (your prompt plus all uploaded documents and the model’s response combined).

Question 6

What is Llama 3.1 8B best for?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B is most useful for real-time ux, classification and edge deployment. Its key strengths are extremely fast, cheapest production-grade model and open weights.

Question 7

How fast is Llama 3.1 8B?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.1 8B generates around 750 output tokens per second with a typical time-to-first-token of 200 ms on the major API providers. Reasoning models that "think" before answering will appear slower on tokens-per-second since they spend time on internal chain-of-thought.

Question 8

Is Llama 3.1 8B better than Llama 3.3 70B?

Accepted Answer

Llama 3.3 70B scores higher on our intelligence index (66 vs 44), so on the hardest tasks Llama 3.3 70B typically wins. Llama 3.1 8B can still be the better pick on price, latency or specific capabilities. See our full Llama 3.1 8B vs Llama 3.3 70B comparison at /ai-models/compare/llama-3-3-70b-vs-llama-3-1-8b/.

Question 9

What is the best alternative to Llama 3.1 8B?

Accepted Answer

The closest alternatives to Llama 3.1 8B are Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.1 405B and Mistral Small 3. Each shares most of Llama 3.1 8B’s use-cases — pick by price, context window or specific capability rather than headline intelligence.

Question 10

Is Llama 3.1 8B open source?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Llama 3.1 8B is open-source — the weights are publicly available, and you can self-host it or use a hosted provider (Together, Fireworks, Groq, Replicate). Some open-source licenses include usage caveats; check the model’s license file before deploying.

Question 11

Can I use Llama 3.1 8B for free?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Llama 3.1 8B is open-weights, so you can download it and run it locally for free (just your hardware cost). Hosted access is paid via providers like Together, Fireworks, Groq and Replicate.

Llama 3.1 8B

At a glance

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