Meta Releases Llama 3 70B: Open-Source Alternative to GPT-4
Meta's Llama 3 70B approaches GPT-4 performance -analysis of capabilities, cost savings for agent deployment, and self-hosting economics.
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Max Beech
Head of Content
The News: Meta released Llama 3 70B, achieving 82.0 on MMLU vs GPT-4's 86.4 -narrowing gap to 4.4 percentage points (previously 15+ points with Llama 2).
Performance Comparison:
| Benchmark | Llama 3 70B | GPT-4 | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 82.0% | 86.4% | -4.4% |
| HumanEval | 58.2% | 67.0% | -8.8% |
| GSM8K (Math) | 79.6% | 92.0% | -12.4% |
Verdict: Llama 3 70B competitive for most tasks, GPT-4 still better for complex reasoning.
Cost Economics:
GPT-4 Turbo (API):
Llama 3 70B (self-hosted on AWS):
- Compute: £400/month (p4d.xlarge, 40GB GPU)
- Setup/maintenance: £200/month (DevOps time)
- Total: £600/month
Breakeven: ~50K queries/month
Below 50K: Use GPT-4 API (cheaper, no ops overhead) Above 50K: Self-host Llama 3 70B (costs don't scale with volume)
When to Use Llama 3 70B:
✅ High query volume (>50K/month) ✅ Data sovereignty requirements (can't send to third parties) ✅ Offline deployment needed ✅ Cost predictability (fixed cost vs variable API)
❌ Low volume (<10K/month): API cheaper ❌ No ML Ops team: Managing self-hosted models requires expertise ❌ Need cutting-edge performance: GPT-4 still 4-12% better
Open-source opportunity: Fine-tune Llama 3 70B on domain data, potentially match or exceed GPT-4 for specific use cases (legal, medical, finance).
Sources:
- Meta AI Llama 3 Announcement