Llama 4 Scout and Maverick: Meta's Open Source Multimodal LLMs Arrive

What Are Llama 4 Scout and Maverick?

Meta has released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick, two new open-weight multimodal large language models. Both use a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 17 billion active parameters across 128 expert modules. This means the models are large in capability but efficient in computation, activating only the relevant experts for each task.

Why Is MoE Architecture Important?

Mixture-of-Experts allows the model to route different types of tasks to specialized sub-networks. Instead of running all parameters for every query, Llama 4 activates only the most relevant experts — delivering high performance at lower computational cost. For developers running local inference, this is a game-changer for hardware requirements.

What Makes These Models Multimodal?

Llama 4 Scout and Maverick natively process both text and images, meaning they can analyze screenshots, describe photos, read charts, and combine visual and textual reasoning in a single prompt. This eliminates the need for separate vision and language models in many workflows.

How Can Developers Get Started?

The models are available through Hugging Face under Meta's Llama license. You can run them locally using Ollama 0.6.2 or vLLM 0.8.4, both of which have added specific MoE support. Start with the Ollama quickstart for local testing, then scale to vLLM for production deployments.

FAQ

Q: What's the difference between Scout and Maverick? A: Scout is optimized for faster inference and lower resource usage, while Maverick is tuned for maximum capability. Choose Scout for real-time applications and Maverick for batch processing or complex reasoning.

Q: Can I use Llama 4 commercially? A: Yes, under Meta's Llama license, which permits commercial use with some restrictions on scale. Check the license terms for your specific use case.

Q: What hardware do I need to run Llama 4 locally? A: With MoE quantization (GGUF format via llama.cpp), you can run Scout on a single consumer GPU with 16GB VRAM. Maverick benefits from 24GB+ or multi-GPU setups.

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