Using Llama 3 8B Instruct on GCP Vertex AI
Implementation guide · Llama 3 · AI at Meta
GCP Vertex AI exposes Llama 3 8B Instruct through model ID llama3-8b-instruct. Use the setup steps, sourced pricing, capabilities, and official provider links below to validate this route before deployment.
Last refreshed 2026-07-09. Next refresh: weekly.
Quick Start
- 1
- 2Use the GCP Vertex AI SDK or REST API to call
llama3-8b-instruct— see the documentation for request format. - 3
Code Examples
pip install google-cloud-aiplatformGOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECTllama3-8b-instructFor Google-published models use the model name directly, e.g. "gemini-2.0-flash-001". For third-party publishers (Anthropic, Meta, etc.) use the full publisher path, e.g. "publishers/anthropic/models/claude-3-5-sonnet-v2@20241022".
import os
import vertexai
from vertexai.generative_models import GenerativeModel
# Reads GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT from env; authenticates via Application Default Credentials
vertexai.init(project=os.environ["GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT"], location="us-central1")
model = GenerativeModel("llama3-8b-instruct")
response = model.generate_content("Hello")
print(response.text)Pricing on GCP Vertex AI
| Type | Price (per 1M) |
|---|---|
| Input tokens | $0.12 |
| Output tokens | $0.36 |
Capabilities
About Llama 3 8B Instruct
The Llama 3 8B Instruct model, released on April 18, 2024, is Meta's latest instruction-following language model with 8 billion parameters. It utilizes an auto-regressive transformer architecture with Grouped-Query Attention for improved scalability. Trained on over 15 trillion tokens and fine-tuned with 10 million human-annotated examples, it excels in dialogue and conversational tasks. The model outperforms its predecessors on industry benchmarks, scoring 68.4 on MMLU (5-shot). Designed for commercial and research applications, it prioritizes safety and helpfulness, making it suitable for chatbots, virtual assistants, and other interactive AI applications. For more details, visit the Hugging Face page [1].