Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct vs shieldgemma-9b

Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 10 November 2026.

meta-llama · A · Open weights
Params
8.0 B
Context
—
30d
4.5 M
llama3.1 licence · conditional
google · B · Open weights
Params
9.2 B
Context
—
30d
256 K
gemma licence · conditional

Specification comparison

Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.

Specification Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct shieldgemma-9b
Deployment Open weights · also via API Open weights
Parameters 8.0 B 9.2 B
Architecture LlamaForCausalLM Gemma2ForCausalLM
Context length 131,072 —
Licence llama3.1 gemma
Commercial use Conditional Conditional
Languages 8 —
Downloads 30d 4,504,499 255,931
Downloads all time 193.6 M 314 K
Quantizations on the Hub SAFETENSORS SAFETENSORS
Gated Yes — accept licence Yes — accept licence
First seen on the Hub 2024-07-18 2024-07-16
API input price / 1M tokens $0.02 not on OpenRouter
API output price / 1M tokens $0.04 not on OpenRouter
Est. cost per 1M input + 1M output tokens $0.06 not on OpenRouter
Cached input / 1M tokens — not on OpenRouter
AA Intelligence Index — not on OpenRouter
AA Coding Index 5.4 not on OpenRouter
AA Agentic Index — not on OpenRouter
Max output tokens 16,384 not on OpenRouter
API providers 4 not on OpenRouter
Tool calling Yes not on OpenRouter
Reasoning mode No not on OpenRouter

API cost

Estimated cost of 1M input + 1M output tokens via OpenRouter

Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct $0.06

Download trend

Daily snapshots, last 90 days (13 Aug – 10 Nov)

7.6 M151 K
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct shieldgemma-9b

VRAM side by side

On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted

Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct · fp16 19.4 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably
shieldgemma-9b · fp16 22.2 GB / 24 GB
⚠️ Tight — reduce context

Adjacent comparisons