Meta Llama 4

Open-weight multimodal MoE models with 10M context — free to run

Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick on April 5, 2026 — the first open-weight natively multimodal models built with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Scout is a 17B active parameter model with 16 experts that fits on a single NVIDIA H100, with an industry-leading 10 million token context window. Maverick is also 17B active parameters but with 128 experts, delivering performance that benchmarks comparably to GPT-4o and DeepSeek v3 on reasoning and coding tasks. Both models process text, images, and video inputs, and are freely available for download on Hugging Face and llama.com. Llama 4 Scout was trained on 40 trillion tokens of data. The MoE architecture means the models punch well above their weight in active parameter count — Scout competes with models 5-10x its size on many benchmarks, while keeping inference costs low. This release closes the gap between open and proprietary models significantly. Organizations that previously needed to pay for GPT-4o or Claude for multimodal tasks can now run comparable capability locally or via any cloud provider. For the open-source AI ecosystem, Llama 4 is the biggest release of 2026 so far.

Panel Reviews

The Builder

Developer Perspective

Ship

“A multimodal MoE model that fits on a single H100 and handles 10M context is insane for the price of free. Scout is the model I'll be running for 80% of production workloads going forward — the economics versus GPT-4o or Claude don't even compare. Deploy it now.”

The Skeptic

Reality Check

Ship

“I'll still reach for frontier proprietary models for the hardest reasoning tasks and production-critical applications where errors are costly. But I can't deny that Llama 4 Scout closes the gap more than I expected. The 10M context on Scout is genuinely unprecedented for open weights.”

The Futurist

Big Picture

Ship

“Llama 4 will commoditize multimodal AI the same way Llama 2 commoditized text generation. The 10M context window in an open-weight model is a civilizational-level unlock for researchers, non-profits, and countries that can't afford to depend on US cloud providers for advanced AI.”

The Creator

Content & Design

Ship

“An open-weight model that understands images and video means I can build custom creative pipelines without routing everything through proprietary APIs. For studios, agencies, and indie creators, Llama 4 fundamentally changes the cost structure of AI-assisted production.”