Meta Llama 3.3 70B Review — Near-405B Performance at 70B Cost

Meta Llama 3.3 70B Instruct launched December 6, 2024 as the final model in Meta's 2024 release cadence. A text-focused 70B model that matches or beats Llama 3.1 405B on instruction following (IFEval 92.1%) and mathematics (MATH 77.0%), while costing 4–5x less to run. 128K context, open weights, commercial license. This review covers benchmarks, architecture, deployment options, pricing, and how it compares to its predecessors.