Llama 3.1 405B vs Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking
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 Llama 3.1 405B and Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking.
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.
Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking
Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking is the reasoning-optimized variant of the Qwen3-VL-8B multimodal model, designed for advanced visual and textual reasoning across complex scenes, documents, and temporal sequences. It integrates enhanced multimodal alignment and...
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Llama 3.1 405B | Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Alibaba |
| Context Window | 131,072 tokens | 256,000 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | 90/100 | N/A |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | 550 ms | N/A |
| Deployment Model | self hostable | self hostable |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2024-07-23 | 2025-10-14 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking
$0.12
Output Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking
$1.36
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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.
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
Qwen3 VL 8B Thinking Quirks & Gotchas
No developer gotchas reported.