Claude 3 Sonnet vs Llama 3.1 405B
How do these models stack up? Below is an expert side-by-side comparison of specifications, context window capacity, live pricing per million tokens, and standardized benchmark scores for Claude 3 Sonnet and Llama 3.1 405B.
Claude 3 Sonnet
Claude 3 Sonnet was Anthropic's balanced standard model in the first Claude 3 generation, optimized for a combination of response speed and general-purpose capabilities across writing, summarization, and question answering. Released in March 2024 alongside Opus and Haiku, it occupied the mid-tier positioning in the Claude 3 lineup. Claude 3 Sonnet has since been deprecated, and current use cases requiring similar capability-to-cost balance are best served by the Claude 4 Sonnet series, which offers substantially improved reasoning, context handling, and instruction following at competitive pricing.
Llama 3.1 405B
Llama 3.1 405B is Meta's largest open-weight language model and one of the most capable openly available models in the world. With 405 billion parameters, it achieves performance competitive with GPT-4 and Claude Opus across benchmarks spanning general knowledge, mathematics, coding, and multilingual tasks. Llama 3.1 405B is released under Meta's custom commercial license, supporting broad use cases including deployment via major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and self-hosted inference with multi-GPU configurations.
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1 405B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Context Window | 200,000 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | N/A | 90/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | N/A | 550 ms |
| Deployment Model | N/A | self hostable |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2024-03-04 | 2024-07-23 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Claude 3 Sonnet
$3.00
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Output Price per Million Tokens
Claude 3 Sonnet
$15.00
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
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Benchmark Performance Metrics
Scores show the raw performance percentages verified across key evaluation suites. Higher bars indicate superior accuracy and capability in that domain.
Claude 3 Sonnet Quirks & Gotchas
No developer gotchas reported.
Llama 3.1 405B Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Massive model — requires 8× A100 80GB for FP16 inference
- ▸Available via Together AI, Fireworks, and Bedrock as managed API