How to Self-Host Llama 4 for a Private AI Chatbot
Self-hosting Llama 4 keeps data on your own box. This walkthrough covers serving, quantisation, access control and the costs nobody mentions.
Meta's open-weight natively multimodal model family with a 10M-token context
Llama 4 is Meta’s open-weight family of natively multimodal models, released in April 2025. It ships in two main variants: Scout with a 10 million token context window, and Maverick with 17 billion active parameters per token. Weights are downloadable, and the licence permits most commercial use.
Llama 4 is the fourth generation of Meta’s Llama models. The headline change is architecture: both variants are mixture-of-experts, and both take text and images as input from the ground up rather than bolting on a vision encoder later.
Scout is the long-context model, built for stuffing in entire books or code repositories. Maverick is the generalist, with 400 billion total parameters and 17 billion active at any one time.
Llama 4 makes sense when you need open weights, on-prem deployment, or a context window nobody else offers. Scout on a single H100 is a genuinely useful option for document-heavy pipelines.
Be realistic about quality. Independent evaluations put Llama 4 Maverick below Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-4o on many reasoning and coding tasks, and Meta’s own launch benchmark claims were disputed by some researchers. The licence also adds conditions for companies with over 700 million monthly users, so it is not fully unrestricted.