Llama Made Crystal Clear · chapter 1: What Llama Actually Is
The Llama family tree, from dense Llama 3.x through the mixture-of-experts Llama 4...
2026-08-27
Below: the paragraph from the book that builds this idea, then the diagram itself (Figure 1.1), and a recap. About a minute of reading.
Meta's own Llama 3 page describes the 8B as a "light-weight, ultra-fast model you can run anywhere" and the 405B as its "flagship foundation model driving widest variety of use cases," while the 1B and 3B are pitched as "light-weight, efficient models you can run everywhere" and the 11B and 90B as "multimodal and can reason on high resolution images." Read those descriptions carefully and a pattern appears: this family was built to cover a size range, not to chase one flagship number. That range is the subject of Figure 1.1.
Recap
- The idea: The Llama family tree, from dense Llama 3.x through the mixture-of-experts Llama 4 generation.
- The picture: Figure 1.1, from chapter 1 ("What Llama Actually Is") of Llama Made Crystal Clear.
- Go deeper: the chapter builds this step by step, with recipes and sources at the end.
This diagram is one of many in Llama Made Crystal Clear.
Every chapter opens with the gist, draws the hard ideas, and ends with recipes and sources.
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