“Meta's Llama 3.1 is the open-weights workhorse — strong general performance you can run on your own hardware with no per-token bill and full data control.”

By AITools · Privately-hosted assistants, fine-tuned domain models, on-prem deployments with data-residency requirements · Free tier

✓ Pros

Open weights — full control, fine-tuning, and on-prem deployment. No per-token cost when self-hosted. Multiple sizes (8B / 70B / 405B) for different budgets. Massive community and tooling ecosystem. Strong data-privacy story.

✗ Cons

No longer frontier on the hardest reasoning tasks. Large variant needs significant GPU resources. Self-hosting carries real ops overhead.