Text Gen · Model Guide · 5 min read

Llama 3.3 70B

Meta's dense 70B workhorse — the classic 'two-GPU' model that made serious local AI mainstream.

Basic Information

Llama 3.3 70B is Meta's dense flagship of the 3.x generation: 70 billion parameters distilled-tuned to match much of Llama 3.1 405B's quality at a fraction of the size. It remains one of the most deployed open models in the world — the default 'big brain' for self-hosted assistants, and the model an enormous ecosystem of tools and fine-tunes is built around.

It is a dense model, so all 70B parameters work on every token: excellent consistency, straightforward performance prediction (bandwidth ÷ size), and no routing surprises. Context tops out at 128K tokens.

Best use cases

• Self-hosted team assistants where a permissive-ish license and huge ecosystem matter
• Single-box 70B inference on 48 GB of VRAM (2×24 GB cards or a 48 GB card)
• Fine-tuning base for domain specialists — the largest fine-tuning ecosystem in open AI
• Long-form writing, analysis, and multilingual chat at near-frontier quality

Computational Requirements

The classic two-card target: Q4 needs about 33 GB of weights plus context, landing squarely in 2×24 GB territory.

• On a single 24 GB card you will need Q2 (with noticeable quality loss) — the dual-GPU route is strongly preferred; see our dual-GPU rig guide in the blog.

Commercial license

Llama Community License: commercial use permitted with conditions — attribution requirements, an acceptable-use policy, and special terms only for platforms exceeding ~700M monthly users. It is not Apache/MIT, but for almost everyone it is commercial-friendly; read the license text once before shipping.