Meta Platforms is significantly delaying its flagship LLama 4 Behemoth AI model. The company is pushing its debut from early summer to fall 2025 or later, The Wall Street Journal reported. This setback stems from struggles to improve the large-language model’s capabilities. Internal fears that its performance won’t meet public statements also contribute, casting doubt on Meta’s multi-billion-dollar AI strategy. The news prompted a dip in Meta’s stock of up to 3.2%.
This delay is critical. It signals potential slowing in AI advancement and raises questions about Meta’s direction despite vast spending. The company plans up to $72 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely for AI. According to The Wall Street Journal, internal frustration is mounting. Senior executives reportedly blame the Llama 4 models team for the lack of progress on Behemoth.
They are also contemplating “significant management changes” to the AI product group. Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has not publicly set a timeline for Behemoth. However, the company could still opt for an earlier, more limited release. A Meta spokesman declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal on the delay.
Internal Hurdles and Shifting Expectations
Initially, Behemoth was slated for an April release. This would have aligned with Meta’s first AI developer conference, before an internal target shifted to June. Now, its future is less clear. The Wall Street Journal’s sources indicate Meta engineers and researchers are concerned. They fear Behemoth’s performance wouldn’t live up to the company’s prior claims about its capabilities.
This concern is amplified by earlier issues. The Information previously reported problems with recent Llama models. Meta also acknowledged submitting a specially optimized Llama model to a leaderboard in April, not the publicly available version. Llama 4 has been receiving mixed quality reports and results on competitive benchmarks that cast doubts. Meta’s Ahmad Al-Dahle attributed variable quality to needing to “stabilize implementations,” as he stated on X.
We're glad to start getting Llama 4 in all your hands. We're already hearing lots of great results people are getting with these models.
— Ahmad Al-Dahle (@Ahmad_Al_Dahle) April 7, 2025
That said, we're also hearing some reports of mixed quality across different services. Since we dropped the models as soon as they were…
The development of Behemoth and other Llama models has also seen significant team changes, with eleven of the 14 original Llama paper researchers having departed Meta. A different team now handles subsequent Llama versions.
Despite current challenges, Meta’s AI Blog on April 5 highlighted Behemoth’s early promise while it was “still training.” The company stated its teacher model, Llama 4 Behemoth, “outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on STEM-focused benchmarks such as MATH-500 and GPQA Diamond.” The post also mentioned an intent to share more technical details later.
AI Industry Faces Broader Delays
Meta’s situation with Behemoth is not unique. It reflects a broader pattern of delays and recalibrations in the AI sector. OpenAI’s anticipated GPT-5, initially expected around mid-2024, faced development setbacks and apparently to a release as GPT-4.5, with OpenAI using the GPT-5 name for an upcoming thinking model now. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later clarified in February that a model with major breakthroughs was still months off. Similarly, Anthropic’s larger Claude 3.5 Opus model remains unreleased, though the company stated earlier it was “coming soon.”
These industry-wide stumbles suggest that future AI advancements might come at a slower pace and higher cost than initially anticipated. Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, an assistant professor at New York University’s Center for Data Science, told The Wall Street Journal that now “the progress is quite small across all the labs, all the models.” Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management, commenting on the Behemoth delay to CNBC Television, characterized it for Meta as, “It’s a black eye but doesn’t change their opportunity.”
High Stakes and Lingering Questions
The immense resources Meta is pouring into AI, including its grand ambitions for AI, underscore the strategic importance of models like Behemoth. The financial pressures of the AI race were highlighted by reports that indicated Meta had sought external funding for Llama development from competitors like Amazon and Microsoft, a pitch dubbed as the “Llama Consortium.”
Adding to development complexities are ongoing legal and ethical questions regarding Meta’s AI training data. Active lawsuits, such as one involving comedian Sarah Silverman, allege the company trained Llama models on massive datasets of pirated books. Court documents even quoted an unnamed Meta engineer expressing unease, stating, “Torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”
These issues, alongside Meta’s competitive strategies like its move to block Apple’s system-wide Apple Intelligence features in its apps, illustrate the challenging terrain the company is navigating.
