Llama 3.3 70B Instruct vs DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B

Meta's December 2024 refresh of Llama 3 70B that closes most of the gap with Llama 3.1 405B for chat workloads while remaining tractable on a single H100. Strong instruction following, robust tool-use behaviour, and a 128K context window make it the default choice for production chat at 70B scale. The 3.3 release was trained on a refreshed instruction-tuning data mix and benefits from Meta's most recent alignment work. It outperforms the much larger 3.1 405B on several reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of inference cost. The licence is the Llama 3 Community License, which permits commercial use unless your service exceeds 700M monthly active users. Good pick for: production chat at scale, RAG over long documents, agentic workflows where tool use matters, and any 70B-tier replacement for closed proprietary models.

R1 reasoning capabilities distilled into a Llama 3.3 70B base. The most accessible way to run R1-class reasoning locally — fits on a single H100 in fp16 or on a 4090 at Q4. Inherits Llama 3's community licence (commercial use under 700M MAU). Great pick for production reasoning workloads where the full R1 is too expensive to host but o1/R1-style quality is required.