Meta’s Llama 4: Multimodal AI Breakthrough, is it any good?
April 5, 2025 – Meta has officially introduced Llama 4, the next evolution of its large language model (LLM) series, bringing powerful multimodal capabilities and long-context understanding to developers and researchers alike. With this release, Meta is doubling down on its open-weight AI strategy and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI assistants.
Two Models, One Vision
The initial rollout includes two variants: Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick. Both use a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with 17 billion active parameters. Scout includes 16 experts and supports a massive 10 million token context window, allowing it to handle long-form reasoning tasks like analyzing entire books or extensive codebases.
Maverick, meanwhile, features 128 experts and is engineered for higher-end tasks, offering performance comparable to or better than other industry-leading models in reasoning, coding, and multilingual tasks.
Multimodal and Agentic Intelligence
Llama 4 is Meta’s first natively multimodal model, capable of interpreting and generating text, speech, and soon, vision data. This makes it well-suited for digital assistants that can understand voice commands, maintain long conversations, and assist across multiple applications. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has emphasized Llama 4’s role as the foundation for “agentic AI” — systems that can act autonomously in pursuit of user goals.
Looking Ahead: The Behemoth Model
Meta is also working on an even larger model nicknamed “Llama 4 Behemoth,” expected to reach nearly 2 trillion parameters. The company believes this model will be essential for tasks requiring deep reasoning and creativity, while still committing to releasing models that can run on more modest hardware.
Open Access and Integration
Both Scout and Maverick are available under open terms, continuing Meta’s push for transparency and collaboration in the AI space. The models can be downloaded directly from Llama.com and Hugging Face, and are already integrated into Meta AI across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram Direct.
With Llama 4, Meta is not only challenging the dominance of proprietary AI systems but also reshaping how accessible, versatile, and powerful AI tools can be.
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