The artificial intelligence community is buzzing following Meta Platforms' release of its Llama 4 large language model family in April 2025, a development that has prompted prominent AI figures to declare a new era for the tech giant. Bojan Tunguz, a Senior Data Scientist at NVIDIA and a respected voice in the AI/ML community, encapsulated this sentiment in a recent tweet stating, "Now Meta has no more excuses," signaling a significant shift in Meta's competitive standing. This release builds upon the momentum of Llama 3.1, which debuted in July 2024.
Llama 4, encompassing models like Scout and Maverick, introduces multimodal capabilities, processing text, images, and potentially video and audio. Leveraging a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, these models aim for enhanced efficiency and performance. Internal benchmarks from Meta suggest Llama 4 Maverick surpasses OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini 2.0 on specific tasks, including coding, reasoning, and multilingual applications, though it may not consistently outperform the very latest models like Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
Meta has positioned Llama 4 as a cornerstone of its "open" AI strategy, making the models widely accessible for research and commercial use under a community license. This approach has driven substantial adoption, with Llama models collectively seeing over 650 million downloads by late 2024. Strategic partnerships with major cloud providers and hardware companies, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and NVIDIA, have further broadened Llama's reach, making advanced AI more accessible and cost-effective for developers and businesses.
Despite Meta's emphasis on "openness," the Llama 4 community license is not officially Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved and includes certain usage restrictions, such as a 700 million monthly user limit and an acceptable use policy. The Free Software Foundation even classified Llama 3.1's license as nonfree in January 2025. This licensing debate exists alongside reports of initial development delays for the larger Llama 4 "Behemoth" model, which reportedly struggled to meet internal benchmarks in reasoning and math tasks.
Tunguz's tweet highlights Meta's progress in overcoming previous challenges and criticisms, particularly concerning its ability to deliver truly competitive AI models. While the "open-source" definition remains a point of contention and some development hurdles were noted, the widespread availability, advanced capabilities, and significant market adoption of Llama 4 demonstrate Meta's solidified position as a formidable player in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape.