Meta has introduced its latest addition to the Llama family, the Llama 4 AI models. The new models include Llama 4 Scout, Llama 4 Maverick, and Llama 4 Behemoth. The company has trained these models using "large amounts of unlabeled text, image, and video data" to achieve "broad visual understanding."
DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models, which outperform Meta's previous Llama models in terms of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, have prompted Meta to enhance its Llama 4 models to be more powerful and competitive. The Llama 4 models are now active on Meta's AI platforms, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and are available in 40 countries. However, multimodal features are currently only accessible in the United States in English.
Furthermore, the Llama 4 models come with licensing restrictions for certain users. Companies located in the European Union or with a primary business presence there are prohibited from using the models. Additionally, companies with over 700 million active users must request a special license from Meta to use these models.
The Llama 4 models utilize a "mixture of experts" (MoE) architecture, offering a more efficient approach to data processing and query answering. For example, the Maverick model has 400 billion parameters but uses only 17 billion active parameters across 128 "experts." The Scout model has a massive 10 million-token context window, allowing it to perform well on tasks like document summarization and large codebase analysis.
According to Meta's internal testing, the Maverick model outperforms models like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google Gemini 2.0 in coding, reasoning, multilingual, and image tasks. Meanwhile, the Scout model excels at document summarization and code analysis tasks.
Meta has also stated that it has trained the Llama 4 models to be more balanced and less likely to avoid answering contentious questions. These updates aim to ensure that AI chatbots provide open and neutral responses on political and social topics, without favoring one viewpoint over another.
This new Llama 4 collection marks the beginning of a new era for Meta's AI ecosystem, and the company has announced that additional features and developments will be introduced in the future.
