Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta unveils new Llama 4 AI models amid race to catch up with rivals

Meta has unveiled its latest generation of artificial intelligence models in the Llama family, releasing three new models over the weekend in a surprise Saturday (April 5) announcement. The Llama 4 suite– Scout, Maverick, and Behemoth– marks a significant leap in the company’s ambition to shape the future of open AI, with the models designed to tackle everything from document summarisation to advanced reasoning across text, images, and video.

The models are built on a new “mixture of experts” (MoE) architecture, which promises greater efficiency by delegating tasks to specialised components within the model. Meta claims that Maverick, its flagship general-purpose assistant, can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 on a range of coding, reasoning, and image-based benchmarks. However, it falls short of OpenAI’s most advanced GPT-4.5 and Google’s newer Gemini 2.5 Pro, TechCrunch reported.

Scout and Maverick are now freely available on Meta’s website and through partners including the AI platform Hugging Face, though their use comes with notable caveats. Most significantly, Meta is barring companies and developers based in the European Union from using or distributing the models — a move likely driven by the region’s stringent AI governance and data privacy laws. Meta has previously criticised the EU’s regulatory framework as heavy-handed and innovation-stifling.

More from Tech

As India marks 77th Republic day, India’s tech growth rise is reshaping its global standing What does Trump know about AI that Big Tech doesn't?

Open race heats up

The release follows a flurry of activity in the open-source AI world, spurred in part by Chinese lab DeepSeek’s rapid ascent. Its models — notably R1 and V3 — have performed competitively against Llama 2, prompting Meta to accelerate Llama 4 development, reportedly launching internal “war rooms” to reverse-engineer DeepSeek’s efficiency gains.

Of the three new models, Scout is the most lightweight, with 17 billion active parameters and an impressive 10 million-token context window. This gives it the ability to process sprawling documents and long codebases, making it suitable for academic research, enterprise data analysis, and legal work. It’s also optimised to run on a single Nvidia H100 GPU, allowing more modest deployments compared to its heavier sibling.

Quick Reads

View All

TeraWave vs Starlink: Bezos-owned Blue Origin to launch 5,400 satellites to rival Musk’s internet firm

South Korea launches landmark laws to regulate AI, startups warn of compliance burdens

Maverick, meanwhile, weighs in with 400 billion parameters (17 billion active across 128 experts) and is geared toward more general AI assistant tasks such as creative writing and language comprehension. It requires enterprise-level compute infrastructure, including Nvidia’s DGX systems, to operate effectively.

Still in training is Behemoth, a model that Meta says will eclipse rivals on key STEM benchmarks. With 288 billion active parameters and nearly two trillion in total, it’s among the largest AI models ever publicly described. Meta’s early tests suggest Behemoth could beat GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Pro in solving complex mathematical and scientific problems — though Gemini 2.5 Pro remains ahead on several fronts.