Meta unveiled its latest family of generative AI model on Saturday. You can give the Llama 4 models a test drive now through Meta AI’s website, and Llama 4 will soon power the many Meta AI features on the company’s Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger services.
The competition between Meta and other AI companies is becoming increasingly intense. Companies are working to build and release AI models capable of more complex tasks and advanced reasoning without requiring vast amounts of computing power and cash to run. It’s a tricky sweet spot to hit, and Meta hopes its newest models will put it ahead of competitors like ChatGPT and Gemini.
There are two models in the Llama 4 family available now: Scout and Maverick. They’re open-weights models and multimodal, which means they can generate text, images and code. Open models like Meta’s mean that developers can get some insight into how the models are built. The Llama 4 models are open-weights models, which means you can see how the model makes connections and how certain characteristics are given more weight as it learns. OpenAI announced earlier this month that it is developing an open-weights model for the first time.
Scout is the smallest model of the family, designed to run on a single Nvidia H100 GPU. Scout has a 10 million token context window and is a 17 billion parameter model featuring 16 experts (subnetworks within the model, allowing it to run tasks more efficiently). Scout has more than twice the firepower of Llama 3, which has 8 billion parameters. Generally, the more parameters a model has, the more capable it is of delivering better results faster.
Maverick is a midsized model, the big brother to Scout, featuring 17 billion parameters with 128 experts. Meta said benchmark tests showed Maverick beat ChatGPT-4o and text generation done by DeepSeek V3. DeepSeek still has the edge when it comes to reasoning and coding. CNET hasn’t independently verified Meta’s benchmarking tests.
More information on the rest of the Llama 4 family, including a base model named Behemoth and a Llama 4 reasoning model, is expected to come later this month, according to a video posted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We’ll likely learn more about these models at LlamaCon, the company’s first annual AI developers conference beginning on April 29.
For more, check out what we know about a potential standalone app for Meta AI and our review of the best AI chatbots.
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