Llama 3.1 8B Instruct — pricing, providers, and benchmarks

Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is the workhorse of the small-model tier: 8 billion parameters, 131K context window, and per-token pricing that sits at $0.05–$0.10 across most providers — cheap enough to run at scale without budget tracking. It's the right choice for classification, simple summarization, content moderation, autocomplete-style code suggestions, and any workload where you'd otherwise reach for a custom-trained model. Quality is well below the 70B for complex reasoning or nuanced generation, but for the 80% of production LLM workloads that are "extract this field" or "categorize this email," 8B is more than enough — and lets you run 10x the volume for the same monthly bill.