# Claude 3 Sonnet vs Llama 3.1-8B

> Claude 3 Sonnet is the stronger model overall, scoring 29.0 to 23.0 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-3-sonnet-vs-llama-3-1-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 28

## Summary

- They share 28 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher in 8 categories and Llama 3.1-8B in 0 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude 3 Sonnet leads 21.1 to 8.0.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is GPQA Diamond: 40.6% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 27% for Llama 3.1-8B.
- Llama 3.1-8B has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Noometry Index | 29.0 | 23.0 |
| Rank | 319 | 352 |
| Context | — | 128K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.05 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.08 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |

## Coding

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 29.6 (#302)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 20.2 (#340)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 10.2% | 1.7% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 42.7% | 32.8% |
| LMArena Coding | 1223 | 1195 |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 53.8% | 40.5% |
| HumanEval+ | 64% | 62.8% |
| MBPP+ | 69.3% | 55.6% |
| SciCode | — | 13.2% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 3 Sonnet: —
- Llama 3.1-8B: 22.5 (#131)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 25.8% |
| BALROG | — | 15.1% |

## Reasoning

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 20.5 (#237)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 14.9 (#321)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1197 | 1175 |
| DTBench | 53.6% | 50.9% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 120.7 | 116.57 |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| LMCA | — | 5.4% |
| PIQA | — | 81.2% |
| WinoGrande | 75.1% | — |

## Math

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 10.7 (#310)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 10.2 (#317)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.5% | 1.7% |
| LMArena Math | 1213 | 1179 |
| MATH Level 5 | 18.2% | 22.9% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 13.7% |
| GSM8K | — | 82.4% |

## Knowledge

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 21.1 (#276)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 8.0 (#307)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 40.6% | 27% |
| LMArena Expert | 1173 | 1144 |
| MMLU | 75.9% | 56.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 40.6% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 24.7% |
| BoolQ | — | 82.8% |

## Multimodal

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 25.2 (#125)
- Llama 3.1-8B: —

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 984 | — |

## Multilingual

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 37.8 (#234)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 34.0 (#249)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1205 | 1148 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1189 | 1151 |
| LMArena French | 1229 | 1177 |
| LMArena German | 1204 | 1144 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1131 | 1061 |
| LMArena Korean | 1128 | 1053 |
| LMArena Russian | 1227 | 1158 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1204 | 1169 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 62.8 (#235)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 58.9 (#258)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1199 | 1159 |
| IFEval | — | 74.3% |

## Long Context

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 36.7 (#228)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 35.8 (#238)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1211 | 1182 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 42.1 (#238)
- Llama 3.1-8B: 29.7 (#290)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Llama 3.1-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1218 | 1187 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1154 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1227 | 1172 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 713 |
| WildBench | — | 68.7% |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet better than Llama 3.1-8B?

Claude 3 Sonnet is the stronger model overall, scoring 29.0 to 23.0 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet or Llama 3.1-8B better for coding?

Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher on coding benchmarks: 29.6 versus 20.2 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Sonnet and Llama 3.1-8B share?

28 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Sonnet has 30 scored results on Noometry and Llama 3.1-8B has 43.