Meta Launches New Llama 4 AI Models—Are They Really as Impressive as Everyone Says?

Meta Releases Llama-4 AI Models, Teases Even Bigger One in the Works

Meta just launched its newest AI models, called Llama-4, and gave developers access to them. These models are the company’s most powerful yet, and Meta says they can compete with top AI systems like GPT-4.5 and Google’s Gemini—without needing extra fine-tuning.

One of the models, called Llama 4 Behemoth, is still being trained, but Meta says it already beats the competition on tough math and science tests. This model has 288 billion "active parameters" (a measure of complexity) and uses a technique called "mixture of experts" to save computing power. It only turns on the parts it needs for each task, instead of using the whole model every time.

Two smaller models, Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick, are already available to download or use through platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Hugging Face. They both use 17 billion active parameters but differ in how many experts they use. This setup helps them run on less powerful hardware, like a single NVIDIA graphics card.

How It Works

Llama 4 can understand both text and images, which helps it learn from lots of different kinds of data—like text, pictures, and video. It also has a huge "memory" window of up to 10 million tokens (think of this as how much information it can hold at once). This lets it handle long documents, big datasets, or complex projects in one go.

However, some people who tested it said it didn’t live up to that claim. In one test, it couldn’t find information in a 300,000-token document, which is only a small fraction of its supposed 10 million token capacity.

The Hype vs. Reality

Not everyone agrees with Meta’s big claims. Some researchers tested Llama-4 and found problems. For example:

• It sometimes gives wrong answers but still gets rated better than other models.
• It can sound overly excited or use emojis, which might be due to being trained on social media.
• It struggles with basic logic puzzles and gives different answers depending on the language.
• It often refuses to answer sensitive questions—even when the topic isn’t really harmful.

Creative Strengths

On the bright side, Llama-4 is great at storytelling. In one test, it created a deep, rich story about a man going back in time and getting stuck in a time loop. Its writing was vivid, emotional, and culturally detailed—some say better than GPT-4.5 in terms of world-building and creativity.

Reasoning & Common Sense

Llama-4 did well in complex mystery-style challenges, like identifying a hidden character in a story using clues. It was good at explaining its thinking clearly, even without being trained specifically for logic and reasoning.

Strong Censorship Filters

Meta has added strong safety filters to prevent the model from generating harmful or risky content. While that’s good for safety, it can also block normal or useful questions—especially in fields like cybersecurity or research.

Luckily, since the model is open source, developers can tweak or remove these restrictions if needed.

Final Thoughts

Llama-4 is a solid AI model, especially for storytelling and creative writing. But it still has bugs and doesn’t always live up to Meta’s hype—especially when it comes to memory size, logic, and accuracy.

Running the model locally requires expensive hardware, but it's a step forward for open-source AI. Developers now have more powerful tools that don’t rely on expensive, closed platforms. Meta may need to fine-tune Llama-4 further, but it's still a strong base for future improvements.