Llama 4 Maverick, released April 5, 2025 alongside the smaller Llama 4 Scout, moved the Llama line to a natively multimodal mixture-of-experts design — roughly 400B total parameters with 17B active per token. It launched with claims of beating GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash at far lower serving cost.

The release proved controversial: an experimental chat-tuned variant's LMArena ranking drew accusations of benchmark gaming, and the promised frontier-scale Behemoth model never shipped. Llama 4 ended up the final release of the Llama era — Meta's next generation arrived in April 2026 under the new Muse Spark name.