Llama 3 is a large language model family designed to handle standard NLP workloads—text generation, translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis—across a range of scales. Meta released it as open source, meaning you can download weights, fine-tune locally, or run it on your own infrastructure instead of hitting an API. The catch: while free to use, the model is young relative to Llama 2, and local deployment requires real hardware or cloud credits. For teams building production systems, this trades managed convenience for control and lower long-term marginal costs.