Introduction

On July 23, 2024, Meta released its latest flagship model, Llama 3.1 405B, along with smaller variants: Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3.1 8B. This release came just three months after the introduction of Llama 3. While Llama 3.1 405B outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus in most benchmarks, making it the most powerful open-source model available, it may not be the optimal choice for many real-world applications due to its slow generation time and high Time to First Token (TTFT).

For developers looking to integrate these models into production or host them themselves, Llama 3.1 70B is a more practical alternative. But how does it compare to its predecessor, Llama 3 70B? Is it worth upgrading if you’re already running Llama 3 70B in production?

In this blog post, we’ll perform a detailed comparison between Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3 70B, examining their performance, efficiency, and suitability for different use cases. Our goal is to help you make an informed decision about which model best suits your needs.

Also read: Meta Llama 3.1: Latest Open-Source AI Model Takes on GPT-4o mini

Overview

• Llama 3.1 70B: Ideal for tasks requiring extensive context, long content generation, and complex document analysis.
• Llama 3 70B: Excels in speed, making it ideal for real-time interactions and applications that require fast responses.
• Benchmark performance: Llama 3.1 70B outperforms Llama 3 70B in most benchmarks, especially in mathematical reasoning.
• Speed ​​trade-off: Llama 3 70B is significantly faster, with lower latency and faster token generation.

Lama 3 70B vs. Lama 3.1 70B

Basic equation

Here is a basic comparison between the two models.