Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
MetaInstruction-tuned 8B Llama 3.1 model for chat and assistant workflows, post-trained with SFT and DPO on Meta's Llama 3.1 base. The 128K context window and Llama Community License made it the default open instruct checkpoint for production chat deployments. Currently the most-downloaded Llama variant on Hugging Face at ~10.8M downloads/month, surpassing every other open chat checkpoint by an order of magnitude.
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, released 23 Jul 2024. 8B dense, 128k context, SFT+RLHF post-trained chat model. Verified live on HF June 2026; one of the most-downloaded instruct models on the platform.
Openness
3 high confidence- weights
- open(downloadable)
- data
- closed
- code
- partial(no training pipeline)
- license
- Llama-3.1-Community(non-OSI
Weights open under Meta's non-OSI Llama 3.1 Community License, with its 700M-MAU commercial cap. Commonly marketed as open. Moved from 2/restricted on 2026-08-01 by the universal license scale, which caps a bounded commercial license at 3 rather than 2. The test at that boundary is whether the license permits commercial use AT ALL: this one does, for everyone inside the bound. A license that forbids commerce outright - CC-BY-NC, Mistral Non-Production - stays at 2. Nine other products carry a bounded license and all now score 3; four of them were already recorded there, which is the inconsistency this resolves.
- https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct recorded 2026-06-04
live card; license=Llama 3.1 Community License w/ 700M MAU cap; 11,077,966 downloads last month
Adoption
5 high confidenceWeights open under Meta's non-OSI Llama 3.1 Community License, with its 700M-MAU commercial cap. Commonly marketed as open. Moved from 2/restricted on 2026-08-01 by the universal license scale, which caps a bounded commercial license at 3 rather than 2. The test at that boundary is whether the license permits commercial use AT ALL: this one does, for everyone inside the bound. A license that forbids commerce outright - CC-BY-NC, Mistral Non-Production - stays at 2. Nine other products carry a bounded license and all now score 3; four of them were already recorded there, which is the inconsistency this resolves.
- https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct recorded 2026-06-04
11,077,966 downloads last month
Capability
3 medium confidenceWeights open under Meta's non-OSI Llama 3.1 Community License, with its 700M-MAU commercial cap. Commonly marketed as open. Moved from 2/restricted on 2026-08-01 by the universal license scale, which caps a bounded commercial license at 3 rather than 2. The test at that boundary is whether the license permits commercial use AT ALL: this one does, for everyone inside the bound. A license that forbids commerce outright - CC-BY-NC, Mistral Non-Production - stays at 2. Nine other products carry a bounded license and all now score 3; four of them were already recorded there, which is the inconsistency this resolves.
- https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct recorded 2026-06-04
8B instruct model card; 128k context; multilingual chat
Unchanged since 2026-08-07 (last edited, not re-checked)