Model reference · open weights

Meta-Llama-3

LLMs NousResearch Text gen 2 builds Its own licence terms 99k dl/mo

Meta-Llama-3 is an open-weight language model from NousResearch. Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct (BF16) weighs 16.1 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is 2× RTX 3060 12 GB.

  • Meta-Llama-3 is an 8.0B parameter instruction-tuned language model developed by Meta and published by NousResearch.
  • It is designed for text generation and assistant-like chat in English, utilizing a transformer architecture with a context length of 8192 tokens.
  • The model operates under a custom commercial license.

Summary of the NousResearch/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released byNousResearch
Released2024-04-18
Parameters8.0B
VRAM16.1 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct (BF16)

16.1 GBweights, file size
131 MBcache per 1K tokens
745 MBruntime overhead, at least
8,192 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB … RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
2 smaller cards
——
RTX 3090 24 GB6all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB6all 8K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB13all 8K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB25all 8K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB57all 8K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB53all 8K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB67all 8K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified80all 8K107 GB
H200 141 GB109all 8K138 GB
B200 180 GB143all 8K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
5all 8K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
12all 8K15.4 GB a card
2× RTX 4090 24 GB
tensor parallel
27all 8K23.4 GB a card
2× RTX 3090 24 GB
tensor parallel
27all 8K23.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
117.9 GB
522.2 GB
825.4 GB
1634.0 GB
3251.2 GB
6485.5 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct (above) ↗ 8.0BBF16 16.1 GB2× RTX 3060 12 GB
Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct ↗ 70.6BBF16 141 GB4× L40S 48 GB

From the model card

What NousResearch says about Meta-Llama-3

Read the model card

Model Details

Meta developed and released the Meta Llama 3 family of large language models (LLMs), a collection of pretrained and instruction tuned generative text models in 8 and 70B sizes. The Llama 3 instruction tuned models are optimized for dialogue use cases and outperform many of the available open source chat models on common industry benchmarks. Further, in developing these models, we took great care to optimize helpfulness and safety.

Model developers Meta

Variations Llama 3 comes in two sizes — 8B and 70B parameters — in pre-trained and instruction tuned variants.

Input Models input text only.

Output Models generate text and code only.

Model Architecture Llama 3 is an auto-regressive language model that uses an optimized transformer architecture. The tuned versions use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to align with human preferences for helpfulness and safety.

Llama 3 family of models. Token counts refer to pretraining data only. Both the 8 and 70B versions use Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) for improved inference scalability.

Model Release Date April 18, 2024.

Status This is a static model trained on an offline dataset. Future versions of the tuned models will be released as we improve model safety with community feedback.

License A custom commercial license is available at: https://llama.meta.com/llama3/license

Where to send questions or comments about the model Instructions on how to provide feedback or comments on the model can be found in the model README. For more technical information about generation parameters and recipes for how to use Llama 3 in applications, please go here.

Intended Use

Intended Use Cases Llama 3 is intended for commercial and research use in English. Instruction tuned models are intended for assistant-like chat, whereas pretrained models can be adapted for a variety of natural language generation tasks.

Out-of-scope Use in any manner that violates applicable laws or regulations (including trade compliance laws). Use in any other way that is prohibited by the Acceptable Use Policy and Llama 3 Community License. Use in languages other than English**.

**Note: Developers may fine-tune Llama 3 models for languages beyond English provided they comply with the Llama 3 Community License and the Acceptable Use Policy.

How to use

This repository contains two versions of Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct, for use with transformers and with the original llama3 codebase.

Use with transformers

You can run conversational inference using the Transformers pipeline abstraction, or by leveraging the Auto classes with the generate() function. Let's see examples of both.

Transformers pipeline
import transformers
import torch

model_id = "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct"

pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model=model_id,
    model_kwargs={"torch_dtype": torch.bfloat16},
    device_map="auto",
)

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a pirate chatbot who always responds in pirate speak!"},
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]

prompt = pipeline.tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
		messages,
		tokenize=False,
		add_generation_prompt=True
)

terminators = [
    pipeline.tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    pipeline.tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("")
]

outputs = pipeline(
    prompt,
    max_new_tokens=256,
    eos_token_id=terminators,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.6,
    top_p=0.9,
)
print(outputs[0]["generated_text"][len(prompt):])
Transformers AutoModelForCausalLM
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
import torch

model_id = "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    device_map="auto",
)

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": "You are a pirate chatbot who always responds in pirate speak!"},
    {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
]

input_ids = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    messages,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
    return_tensors="pt"
).to(model.device)

terminators = [
    tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    tokenizer.convert_tokens_to_ids("")
]

outputs = model.generate(
    input_ids,
    max_new_tokens=256,
    eos_token_id=terminators,
    do_sample=True,
    temperature=0.6,
    top_p=0.9,
)
response = outputs[0][input_ids.shape[-1]:]
print(tokenizer.decode(response, skip_special_tokens=True))

Use with llama3

Please, follow the instructions in the repository

To download Original checkpoints, see the example command below leveraging huggingface-cli:

huggingface-cli download meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct --include "original/*" --local-dir Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct

For Hugging Face support, we recommend using transformers or TGI, but a similar command works.

Hardware and Software

Training Factors We used custom training libraries, Meta's Research SuperCluster, and production clusters for pretraining. Fine-tuning, annotation, and evaluation were also performed on third-party cloud compute.

Carbon Footprint Pretraining utilized a cumulative 7.7M GPU hours of computation on hardware of type H100-80GB (TDP of 700W). Estimated total emissions were 2290 tCO2eq, 100% of which were offset by Meta’s sustainability program.

CO2 emissions during pre-training. Time: total GPU time required for training each model. Power Consumption: peak power capacity per GPU device for the GPUs used adjusted for power usage efficiency. 100% of the emissions are directly offset by Meta's sustainability program, and because we are openly releasing these models, the pretraining costs d

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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