2026-06-11 BREAKTHROUGHS☾ PM
Meta Releases Full Weights for Llama 3.1 405B
📰 THE BRIEF
Meta published the complete parameter set for the 405-billion-parameter Llama 3.1 model under a permissive license. Users can now download the weights from Hugging Face and run inference on a single 8xH100 node or via hosted endpoints that charge under one cent per thousand tokens.
💡 WHY IT MATTERS
Teams replace expensive closed-model API calls with a locally hosted model whose marginal cost approaches zero after hardware purchase. This changes procurement decisions from per-token budgeting to one-time infrastructure spend.
👥 WHO'S DOING IT
Together AI hosts Llama 3.1 405B at $0.90 per million input tokens, achieving 95 percent cost reduction versus GPT-4 Turbo for internal coding assistants at several startups.
⚡ TRY IT
- Visit https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-405B and request access.
- Use the Hugging Face Transformers library to load the model with 4-bit quantization on an 8-GPU server.
- Run the standard text-generation pipeline; you receive identical benchmark scores to the original weights at a fraction of closed-model cost.