Llama 4: Did Meta just push the panic button?
Importance: 3 | # | llama, nathan-lambert
Where Llama 2’s and Llama 3’s releases were arguably some of the top few events in AI for their respective release years, Llama 4 feels entirely lost. Meta has attempted to reinvent their formula of models with substantial changes in size, architecture, and personality, but a coherent narrative is lacking. Meta has fallen into the trap of taking too long to ship, so the bar is impossible to cross successfully.
The question here is: Why is Meta designing their models in the same way as other frontier labs when their audience is open-source AI communities and businesses, not an API serving business or ChatGPT competitor?