Expanding the Llama 4 Herd: New Models Now Available on Azure AI Foundry

Last week, we kicked off the arrival of Meta’s powerful new Llama 4 models in Azure with the launch of three models across Azure AI Foundry and Azure Databricks. Today, we’re expanding the herd with the addition of two new 17B-parameter instruction-tuned models — now available in the Azure AI Foundry model catalog as Models as a Service (MaaS) endpoints

New Models

1. Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct
   A fast, low-latency 17B model with 16 experts — optimized for general-purpose tasks with strong instruction following.
2. Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8
   A larger, more expressive variant with 128 experts and FP8 precision — built for heavier, higher-quality reasoning under constrained compute.

Both models are:

• Hosted as serverless MaaS endpoints — no infrastructure setup required
• Available on GitHub Models and playground

What Makes These Llama 4 Models Special?

These models are part of Meta’s mixture-of-experts (MoE) family of Llama 4 variants. Unlike dense models, these MoE architectures selectively activate a subset of model parameters (experts) per token, yielding improved efficiency without sacrificing output quality.

• Scout-17B-16E offers fast inference for common enterprise workloads like summarization, Q&A, and structured output tasks.
• Maverick-17B-128E-FP8 introduces aggressive expert scaling and FP8 precision, enabling high-throughput inference with improved energy efficiency.

How to Get Started

You can find these models in the Azure AI Foundry model catalog — just search for "Llama-4" or navigate to the Meta model family. With a few clicks, you can:

• Deploy the model as a serverless endpoint
• Invoke it via the Azure AI Foundry playground
• Integrate using the Azure OpenAI-compatible REST API or Python SDK

Use Cases

These 17B models are a great fit for:

• Knowledge assistant copilots
• Long-form summarization
• Table-to-text transformation
• Conversational agents
• Internal developer tools

Explore More

To learn more about last week’s launch of Llama 4 models, including 8B and 70B variants, check out the official Azure blog:  Introducing the Llama 4 Herd in Azure AI Foundry and Azure Databricks

Try these models today in Azure AI Foundry and let us know what you build!