The WSJ is reporting that Meta has delayed the release of its flagship large language model, Llama 4 “Behemoth,” citing internal concerns about its performance and whether it offers meaningful improvements over previous versions.
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Delayed Release: Behemoth, originally targeted for an April release, has now been pushed to fall or later.
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Performance Issues: Engineers say Behemoth shows minimal gains over prior models, sparking debate about whether it’s ready for public release.
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Internal Frustration: Meta executives are frustrated with the Llama 4 team’s progress and may restructure the AI product group.
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Mismatch with Public Claims: Behemoth has been publicly touted as outperforming rivals, but insiders say training issues are limiting its real-world performance.
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Earlier Releases Questioned: Two Llama models released in April performed well on AI leaderboards, but Meta later admitted it had optimized those submissions specifically for the tests.
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Research Team Turnover: 11 of the 14 researchers behind the original Llama model have since left the company.
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Industry Trend: Meta’s delays reflect broader challenges in the AI space—OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Opus have also missed initial release expectations.
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Meta’s AI Spending: The company plans up to $72 billion in capital expenditures this year, much of it devoted to AI development.
Shares of Meta are trading down -$14.12 or -2.16% 15 $645.15, after trading as high as +$3.89 on the day.
This article was written by Greg Michalowski at www.forexlive.com.
