It was Gemini 2.5 Pro that redeemed Google in the eyes of most people as a valid competitor to OpenAI instead of as a joke, so Meta dropping the ball with Llama 4 was extra bad.
Got shitcanned due to bad PR & Zuck God-King terraforming the org, so there'd be a year delay to next release.
Real tragi-comedy, and you have no idea how happy it makes me to see someone in the wild saying this. It sounds so bizarre to people given the conventional wisdom, but, it's what happened.
They beat Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro handily on my benchmark suite. (tl;dr: tool calling and agentic coding).
Llama 4 on Groq was ~GPT 4.1 on the benchmark at ~50% the cost.
They shouldn't have released it on a Saturday.
They should have spent a month with it in private prerelease, working with providers.[1]
The rushed launch and ensuing quality issues got rolled into the hypebeast narrative of "DeepSeek will take over the world"
I bet it was super fucking annoying to talk to due to LMArena maxxing.
[1] my understanding is longest heads up was single-digit days, if any. Most modellers have arrived at 2+ weeks now, there's a lot between spitting out logits and parsing and delivering a response.
No, they are bad models. They were benchmaxxed on LMAreana and a few other benchmarks but as soon as you try them yourself they fall to pieces.
I have my own agentic benchmark[1] I use to compare models.
Llama-4-scout-17b-16e scores 14/25, while llama-4-maverick-17b-128e scores 12/25.
By comparison gemma-4-E4B-it-GGUF:Q4_K_M scores 15/25 (that is a 4B parameter model!) - even GPT3.5 scores 13/25 (with some adjustment because it doesn't do tool calling).
Llama 4 was a bad model, unfortunately.
Gemma 4 E4B is slightly confusingly named, its a 8B param model
It is a 8B model, and it is confusingly named. In fact I made exactly the same point[1] when it was released and promptly forgot!
Source? (Even if rumor)
> Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential matters.
> The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said.
> They added that the leaders of Meta’s A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company’s A.I. products, though no decisions have been reached.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/technology/meta-avocado-a...
The idea that NY Times is particularly anti-Meta seems a stretch. They - like most traditional media companies - are anti-tech in general. The fact they also collect data doesn't make their reporting untrue.
Personally I think a much more interesting rumor to make up would be that Yann Lecun (who famously had his reporting lines rearranged to go through Alexander Wang after Scale.ai acquihire) works at New York University.
New York University is in the same place as the New York Times.
There's a conspiracy for you. I made it up, but I mean it could be true I guess?
(Of course Lecun also publicly congratulated Wang on the launch of the model. But maybe that's a ruse to hide everything.. blah blah)
(sigh) In olden times you would have been free to use the em dash as you pleased. Unfortunately, now it's considered signal that you're an AI bot.