OSAIM
Open Source AI Models

Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

The workhorse 8B instruction-tuned model. Excellent quality-to-cost ratio and the broadest ecosystem support of any open-weights model — every major inference engine, fine-tuning library, and quantization toolchain has a 3.1 8B preset. Fits in 24 GB of VRAM at fp16, ~6 GB at Q4. Strong default for production chat where 70B is overkill, for fine-tuning on a specialist task, and for any workload where you want a known-good baseline.

Parameters
8B
Context length
128K
Modality
text
Released
2024-07-23

Memory & hardware

VRAM (fp16)
16 GB
VRAM (Q4)
4.8 GB
Recommended
RTX 3090 24GB
Quantizations
fp16, fp8, q8_0, q5_k_m, q4_k_m, gguf

License: Llama 3 Community License

SPDX
Commercial use
Yes
Modification
Yes
Redistribution
Yes

Benchmarks

IFEval
80.4
HumanEval
72.6
MMLU
69.4
MATH
51.9
Benchmarks last verified 2026-07-02.

Hosted inference pricing

USD per million tokens.

ProviderInputOutput
groqCheapest$0.05$0.08
together$0.18$0.18
Pricing last verified 2026-05-18. Providers update rates frequently; confirm before integrating.

Run it yourself

Drop-in commands for the three most common open-source inference paths. The Ollama tag is a best-effort match against the registry; verify the size variant before pulling.

Run Llama 3.1 8B Instruct locally
Ollama (easiest)
ollama run llama3.1:8b
Single-line install + run; uses the official Ollama registry tag for this family.
vLLM (production)
vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
High-throughput hosted inference; one command to expose an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server.
Transformers (Python)
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct", device_map="auto", torch_dtype="auto"
)
Direct PyTorch usage. Pin a torch / cuda version that matches your GPU.
Hugging Face ID: meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct

Related models

Same family or similar size — useful when shopping around.

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Context
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License
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Context
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License
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Pocket-sized Llama 3 variant for edge deployment. Surprising chat quality after instruction tuning makes it competitive with much larger models from a previous generation. At Q4 it fits in ~2 GB of VRAM and runs on consumer GPUs and recent Apple Silicon. A strong default for on-device chat, summarisation, and structured extraction tasks where the workload doesn't need frontier reasoning quality.

Context
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License
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License
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Context
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License
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TII's latest dense 7B from December 2024. Strong scores on commonsense reasoning benchmarks. TII's Falcon licence permits royalty-free commercial use with attribution.

Context
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License
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