Meta Quietly Delayed the Release of Its Flagship AI Model
Generated with Imagen 3, prompt: create an image of llama 4 behemoth
Codename “Behemoth” Has Been Delayed…
↳ Not once.
↳ Not twice.
↳ But possibly 'til fall or later 🤷♂️
Why? Because it’s not ready—and may not be anytime soon.
WSJ 🔗 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-is-delaying-the-rollout-of-its-flagship-ai-model-f4b105f7
TL;DR
• Meta's leadership is concerned about the Llama 4 team's performance.
• Engineers are struggling to enhance Behemoth’s AI capabilities to meet user expectations.
• Despite $72B+ in annual capex, the model's hitting the ceiling—fast.
Early in its development, Behemoth was slated for April release to coincide with Meta’s inaugural AI developer conference.
Meta put out two smaller models ahead of the event, but later pushed the target for Behemoth’s release to June.
Now it’s been delayed to fall or later.
Llama 4 Has Issues
The two models that were released in April initially performed well on the popular AI leaderboard, Chatbot Arena.
However, it was later revealed that the model submitted to the leaderboard wasn’t the same model that was released to the public.
Meta previously drew praise for its velocity in catching up to rivals in the global AI arms race and setting the OSS precedent (even though it has guidelines for commercial use).
The LLM Ceiling
🚨 This isn’t just a problem with Meta—we're seeing a wider industry trend known as "the LLM ceiling."
Status on GPT-5? Delayed.
Claude 3.5 Opus? Still MIA.
Across providers, hallucinations remain unsolved.
Companies are pivoting to focus on agentic workflows.
Some researchers see the pattern as evidence that future advances in AI models could come at a far slower pace than in the past, and at an astronomical cost.
For the sake of progress, let’s hope that’s not true... (as I log into Gemini)
