Llama 4 Maverick

Llama 4 Maverick (April 2025) is Meta's flagship open-weight model — a 400B-total / 17B-active MoE with multimodal input and GPT-4o-class quality you can self-host for free.

Best for

• Best general-purpose open-weight Llama 4 — reasoning + coding
• Multimodal (text + image + video) at scale
• Self-hosted production assistants without API lock-in
• MoE efficiency: only 17B active params per token

How it compares — and the India angle

• Open weights = zero licensing cost and full data control — a major win for Indian firms with data-residency rules; self-host in-region.
• MoE means only 17B active, so inference is far cheaper than a 400B dense model — practical for India's GPU budgets.
• A closed model (Grok/GPT/Gemini) is worth paying for only when you need frontier reasoning or no-ops convenience.