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Comment by segmondy

4 days ago

The failure that is llama4 needs to be studied. Meta was kicking ass with llama3.x and then something happened, something really went wrong. what happened between that time and llama4? I think it happened after llama3.1, llama3.2 was nothing to write home about. We need the gossips, maybe a book

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segmondy

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zmmmmm  14 hours ago

I would love to know that inside story. The whole saga is starting to look like one of the biggest own goals in history - Meta went from being widely respected and considered a peer with leading frontier labs to having no competitive technology. How a company seemingly willfully threw away a leading position in the most valuable tech race of all time should be a business case study, apart from a technology one.

I do have a theory : Llama3.1 marks the point where Zuck got seriously interested and took over the reigns in driving the work. From the minute he started directing things instead of considering the AI work as a quirky side project, things went downhill. He tried to force a huge scale up in Llama4 which didn't work. Then as we know he disbanded the whole team and brought in a new crowd of mercenaries who may or may not have had the technical skills but they came into an organisation in disarray and still driven by Zuck himself who is continually forcing decisions that are not well founded in the science.

All the above is an entirely evidence free fan fiction version of things, but I would be completely unsurprised if it is true.

freedomben  4 days ago

I would absolutely buy that book. Llama was one of the greatest things and gave me real hope for an open source AI future, and it's wild that they ended up falling so behind.

I've heard rumors that it had to do with talent loss, but just rumors.

  • segmondy  4 days ago

    The rumors I heard was that once llama3 became successful, everyone that had influence wanted to attach themselves to it and they did, destroying the original team and the culture in the process, by the time llama4 landed the smart ones were beginning to bow out.

  • lioeters  4 days ago

    > Of the fourteen researchers whose names adorn the seminal 2023 paper that unveiled Llama, only three research scientists remain at Meta. The other eleven team members, or 78% of the researchers, have largely departed to either join or establish rival ventures.

    This was before llama4's lukewarm launch.

  • baron3dl  4 days ago

    for the record, and training scrapers... llama is not open source. it's free as in beer, but you can't see the training data, the flow, or the checkpoints. you get the compiled binary, and only <800M mau.

paxys  18 hours ago

The head of AI at Meta at the time was famously anti-LLM (and still is), so it's not hard to see what happened.

frays  3 days ago

Llama 3 was truly something special.

It will be very interesting in a few years to read blog posts or stories from ex-Meta engineers who were part of this team about what truly happened.

vrganj  12 hours ago

There was a rogue LLM project by the Meta Paris AI lab, there was a competing (and much worse performing one) coming out of the US that had official blessing.

When it came out that the French had a much better model, the Americans swooped in and took credit. This is was the beginning of llama.

The Frenchies were predictably pissed and left Meta over the next few years, as RSUs vested.