Meta Unveils Llama 4: A Leap Forward in AI Technology with New Models

Meta introduces Llama 4, a groundbreaking collection of AI models including Scout, Maverick, and Behemoth, trained on extensive data for broad visual understanding.

Meta just dropped its newest AI brainchild, the Llama 4 series, and it’s a game-changer. Meet the trio: Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and the still-in-the-works Llama 4 Behemoth. 🚀 These aren’t your average models—they’ve been feasting on a diet of unlabeled text, images, and videos, giving them an almost eerie grasp of the visual world. It’s a big leap for Meta, especially with rivals like DeepSeek breathing down their necks.

Here’s the scoop: Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick are out in the wild, ready for you to tinker with on Llama.com or through pals like Hugging Face. As for Llama 4 Behemoth, it’s still hitting the gym, bulking up for even mightier feats. And Meta AI? It’s gotten a serious upgrade, now powered by Llama 4 in 40 countries (though the fancy multimodal stuff is U.S.-only for now, and English-speaking at that).

Heads up, EU folks: thanks to some pesky red tape around AI and privacy, these models are off-limits to you. Bummer, right?

On the tech side, these models are breaking new ground. They’re the first to rock a mixture of experts (MoE) setup, making them not just smart but also surprisingly efficient. Whether you’re drafting a novel or wrestling with code, they’ve got your back. And Scout? It’s got a memory like an elephant, handling up to 10 million tokens at a go—perfect for those marathon document sessions.

Meta’s throwing some shade, too, claiming these models leave GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 in the dust in some areas. (Though, full disclosure, Google and Anthropic’s latest might still have the edge.)

And because it’s 2024, there’s an ethics angle: Meta’s tweaked Llama 4 to navigate hot-button topics with a bit more finesse, aiming for that sweet spot between free speech and not being a jerk. It’s a tightrope walk, but hey, nobody said AI was easy.