Llama 3.1 8B is a multilingual, instruction-tuned model with a context window of 131.1K tokens and tool-use capability. It suits cost-effective production deployments that need multilingual coverage and trained tool use.
import { streamText } from 'ai'
const result = streamText({ model: 'meta/llama-3.1-8b', prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'})Meta released Llama 3.1 8B alongside the broader Llama 3.1 family on July 23, 2024, bringing two major upgrades over previous 8B Llama releases: an extended context window of 131.1K tokens and full multilingual capability across eight languages. Both improvements also apply to the 70B, but the 8B delivers them at substantially lower serving cost and higher throughput. This makes it the practical entry point for most teams evaluating the Llama 3.1 generation.
Tool use is a trained capability in this generation. The 8B can participate in agentic workflows that call external tools, making it suitable for lightweight agent pipelines where the per-call cost of a larger model would be prohibitive. Combined with the context of 131.1K tokens, the model can maintain substantial conversation history or reference extensive retrieved documents within a single call.