Meta releases Llama 3 open-weight models (8B, 70B) claiming state-of-the-art performance on standard and custom benchmarks, with 15 trillion token training dataset

Meta released Llama 3 on April 18, 2024, an open-weight model series in 8B and 70B parameter sizes, trained on 15 trillion tokens from publicly available sources and benchmarked against proprietary competitors (Claude Sonnet, GPT-3.5, Mistral Medium) on a proprietary 1,800-prompt human evaluation set covering 12 use cases. The company claims state-of-the-art performance at those model scales and plans to release larger models (400B+) with multimodal and multilingual capabilities in coming months. For financial institutions, this reinforces competitive pressure on proprietary model providers and demonstrates continued capability gains in open-weight alternatives, with distribution across all major cloud platforms, which may shift inference cost structures and vendor lock-in dynamics.