Llama 3.1 405B vs GPT-4.1

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across knowledge, coding, math, and reasoning.

Llama 3.1 405B is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 65 to 43. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Llama 3.1 405B's sharpest advantage is in mathematics, where it averages 70.6 against 26.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is AIME 2024, 72 to 26.4. GPT-4.1 does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

GPT-4.1 gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 128K for Llama 3.1 405B.

Quick Verdict

Pick Llama 3.1 405B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. GPT-4.1 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you need the larger 1M context window.

Knowledge

GPT-4.1

Llama 3.1 405B

58.7

GPT-4.1

78.3

70
MMLU
90.2
70
GPQA
66.3
68
SuperGPQA
-
66
OpenBookQA
-
71
MMLU-Pro
-
7
HLE
-

Coding

GPT-4.1

Llama 3.1 405B

48.3

GPT-4.1

54.6

62
HumanEval
-
46
SWE-bench Verified
54.6
37
LiveCodeBench
-

Mathematics

Llama 3.1 405B

Llama 3.1 405B

70.6

GPT-4.1

26.4

70
AIME 2023
-
72
AIME 2024
26.4
71
AIME 2025
-
66
HMMT Feb 2023
-
68
HMMT Feb 2024
-
67
HMMT Feb 2025
-
69
BRUMO 2025
-
82
MATH-500
-

Reasoning

Llama 3.1 405B
68
SimpleQA
-
66
MuSR
-
82
BBH
-

Instruction Following

GPT-4.1

Llama 3.1 405B

86

GPT-4.1

87.4

86
IFEval
87.4

Multilingual

Llama 3.1 405B
84
MGSM
-

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Llama 3.1 405B or GPT-4.1?

Llama 3.1 405B is ahead overall, 65 to 43. The biggest single separator in this matchup is AIME 2024, where the scores are 72 and 26.4.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Llama 3.1 405B or GPT-4.1?

GPT-4.1 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 78.3 versus 58.7. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Llama 3.1 405B or GPT-4.1?

GPT-4.1 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 54.6 versus 48.3. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Llama 3.1 405B or GPT-4.1?

Llama 3.1 405B has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 70.6 versus 26.4. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Llama 3.1 405B or GPT-4.1?

GPT-4.1 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 87.4 versus 86. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 9, 2026

Weekly LLM Benchmark Digest

Get notified when new models drop, benchmark scores change, or the leaderboard shifts. One email per week.

Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. We only store derived location metadata for consent routing.