Side-by-side comparison of Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta Platforms · United States) and SmolLM3 3B (Hugging Face · USA) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is rated conditional; SmolLM3 3B is EU-ready. They part ways on licence: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is "Llama 3.1 Community Licence", SmolLM3 3B is "Apache 2.0".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | Conditional Per current documentation, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is released under the Llama 3.1 Community Licence — a custom source-available licence rather than OSI open source. Commercial deployment is permitted below 700M MAU subject to the Acceptable Use Policy and attribution rules, but training-data opacity and US origin create EU AI Act transparency and data-transfer gaps that deployers should document. | EU-ready Fully open small model: Apache 2.0 weights, training data published, engineering blueprint public. 6 native languages (EN/FR/ES/DE/IT/PT) covers major EU markets. 128K context via YARN. Strong default for edge or on-prem EU deployments where transparency matters. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-04-17 | 2026-04-16 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Llama 3.1 Community Licence | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Restricted (MAU cap + AUP) | Yes |
| Training data | Token count only | Disclosed |
| Origin | United States | USA |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 12/100 | — |
| Speed | 160 tok/s | — |
| Blended price | $0.10/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.