Meta released Llama 4, its new collection of AI models on April 5. With four new Llama models — Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth — Meta has reportedly amped up its efforts on Llama following the success of models from China’s DeepSeek. The tech giant said that all the models were trained on “large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data” to give them “broad visual understanding.”
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Two of the new models, Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick, are available for download via Meta’s official Llama website and Hugging Face. The company has also previewed Llama 4 Behemoth, a teacher model designed to train and guide other Llama 4 models. These models are “open weight,” meaning they have publicly available trained weights, allowing users to run them locally without relying on cloud APIs. While accessible, they may still have licensing restrictions on changes or commercial use.
Meta describes Llama 4 as its most advanced set of AI models yet, built to support the broader Llama ecosystem. These models aim to help developers and businesses create more tailored and multimodal AI-driven experiences. Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick are Meta’s first open-weight AI models that are natively multimodal and built on a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture.
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Llama 4 models include Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. While Llama 4 Scout is designed as a smaller model, using 17 billion active parameters and 16 experts; Maverick is the more advanced offering in the set, positioned as a competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, and uses 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts. The Behemoth model acts as a teacher model and is the most powerful variant within the Llama 4 family. This multimodal MoE model features 288 billion active parameters, uses 16 experts, and has nearly two trillion total parameters.
Meta also claims that Llama 4 Behemoth outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks.
This release comes shortly after rival OpenAI’s announcement of plans to release the company’s first open-weight model since the release of GPT-2 in 2019.