Falcon 2 vs Llama 3 8B

Falcon 2 11B vs Llama 3 8B: What TII Measured

This is the comparison TII led with at launch: Falcon 2 11B against Meta Llama 3 8B. Here is what was measured, and what is actually different between the two models.

Back to the overview

The published claim

TII reported that Falcon 2 11B outperformed Llama 3 8B on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard at the time of release. That is a claim about one leaderboard on one date, and leaderboards are re-run and replaced, so read it as a snapshot rather than a permanent ranking.

Where they differ beyond the score

  • Parameter count: 11B against 8B, so Falcon 2 is the larger model and the heavier one to host.
  • Licence: Llama 3 has its own community licence with acceptable use terms; Falcon 2 uses the TII Falcon License 2.0, an Apache 2.0 base plus an acceptable use policy.
  • Language coverage: both are English-first with additional languages in the training mix.
  • Vision: Meta pairs Llama 3 with separate vision models; TII ships Falcon 2 11B VLM on the same backbone.

How to choose

If your constraint is memory, the smaller model usually wins before the benchmark does. If your constraint is a single licence covering both text and vision, the Falcon 2 series is the simpler stack. Benchmark deltas at this size are rarely the deciding factor; your own evaluation set is.

Related pages

Falcon 2 benchmarksFalcon 2 vs Llama 3.1 8BFalcon 2 vs Gemma 7B

Sources

falcon2.lol is an independent third-party site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or operated by the Technology Innovation Institute, and it does not speak for TII. Every number on this page is attributed to the source listed above.

Falcon 2 11B vs Llama 3 8B: What TII Measured