Llama 4: Is Meta Sounding the Alarm?

Author(s): Nehdiii

Originally published on Towards AI.

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Llama 2 and Llama 3 marked major milestones in AI during their release years, but Llama 4 feels like a misstep. Despite bold shifts in scale, design, and tone, Meta hasn’t delivered a unifying narrative. Extended development delays have only heightened expectations — ones the release struggles to fulfill.

Reflecting on the timeline of Meta’s major open-source models, the progression unfolds as follows (1):

OPT — Released May 3, 2022 (ai.meta.com | 125M, 350M, 1.3B, 2.7B, 6.7B, 13B, 30B, 66B, 175B): A foundational open model that is underrated in the arc of language modeling research.LLaMA — Released February 24, 2023 (ai.meta.com | 7B, 13B, 33B, 65B): The open weight model that powered the Alpaca age of early open chat models.Llama 2 — Released July 18, 2023 (about.fb.com | 7B, 13B, 70B2): The open standard for academic research for its time period. Chat version had some bumps, but overall a major win.Llama 3 — Released April 18, 2024 (ai.meta.com | 8B, 70B): The open standard for its time. Again, fantastic base models.Llama 3.1 — Released July 23, 2024 (ai.meta.com | 8B, 70B, 405B): Much improved post training and the 405B marked the first time an open weight model competed with… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI