What are the hardware requirements for Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct?

Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct requires approximately 23.1 GB of VRAM and supports a context window of 8K tokens. Quantized variants may run on less VRAM; see the Quantized Models section on this page.

Who developed Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct and how large is it?

Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct is developed by mlabonne, a model with 8b parameters. The model is published as open weights on Hugging Face and indexed on LLM Explorer with full benchmark history.

How does Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct perform on standard benchmarks?

Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct has the following published scores: MMLU 66.72. Compare against reference models on this page or on the LLM Explorer leaderboards.

Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct by mlabonne — VRAM 23.1GB, 8K context

Name: Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct
Author: mlabonne

Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct is an open-source language model by mlabonne. Features: 8b LLM, VRAM: 23.1GB, Context: 8K, License: other, Instruction-Based, Merged, LLM Explorer Score: 0.14, Arc: 58.5, HellaSwag: 78.9, MMLU: 66.7, GSM8K: 52.5.

Merged Model Base model:finetune:nousresear... Base model:nousresearch/meta-l... Conversational Endpoints compatible Instruct Llama Region:us Safetensors Sharded Tensorflow

Model Card on HF 🤗: https://huggingface.co/mlabonne/Meta-Llama-3-12B-Instruct

Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct Parameters and Internals

Model Type

text-generation

Training Details

Methodology:

LazyMergekit to merge layers from source models

Input Output

Accepted Modalities:

text

Output Format:

Generated text

LLM Name	Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct
Repository 🤗	https://huggingface.co/mlabonne/Meta-Llama-3-12B-Instruct
Base Model(s)	Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct NousResearch/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct NousResearch/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct NousResearch/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct NousResearch/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct NousResearch/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct
Merged Model	Yes
Model Size	8b
Required VRAM	23.1 GB
Updated	2026-07-15
Maintainer	mlabonne
Model Type	llama
Instruction-Based	Yes
Model Files	5.0 GB: 1-of-5 4.9 GB: 2-of-5 5.0 GB: 3-of-5 5.0 GB: 4-of-5 3.2 GB: 5-of-5
Model Architecture	LlamaForCausalLM
License	other
Context Length	8192
Model Max Length	8192
Transformers Version	4.40.2
Tokenizer Class	PreTrainedTokenizerFast
Vocabulary Size	128256
Torch Data Type	bfloat16

Rank the Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct capabilities

Have you tried this model? Rate its performance — this feedback helps the ML community find the right model for their needs.

Instruction Following and Task Automation
Factuality and Completeness of Knowledge
Censorship and Alignment
Data Analysis and Insight Generation
Text Generation
Text Summarization and Feature Extraction
Code Generation
Multi-Language Support and Translation

Quantized Models of the Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct

Model	Likes	Downloads	VRAM
Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct AWQ	0	5	7 GB

Best Alternatives to Meta Llama 3 12B Instruct

Best Alternatives	Context / RAM	Downloads	Likes
...otron 8B UltraLong 4M Instruct	4192K / 32.1 GB	1135	125
UltraLong Thinking	4192K / 16.1 GB	2	3
...a 3.1 8B UltraLong 4M Instruct	4192K / 32.1 GB	176	24
...a 3.1 8B UltraLong 2M Instruct	2096K / 32.1 GB	875	9
...otron 8B UltraLong 2M Instruct	2096K / 32.1 GB	124	18
Cthulhu 8B V1.4	1048K / 16.1 GB	10	10
...raLong 1M Instruct Abliterated	1048K / 32.1 GB	4	9
...a 3.1 8B UltraLong 1M Instruct	1048K / 32.1 GB	1387	29
...otron 8B UltraLong 1M Instruct	1048K / 32.1 GB	702	59
Zero Llama 3.1 8B Beta6	1048K / 16.1 GB	7	1

Note: green Score (e.g. "73.2") means that the model is better than mlabonne/Meta-Llama-3-12B-Instruct.