You are currently viewing Meta vs OpenAI: Is Llama 4 the Future of AI?

Meta vs OpenAI: Is Llama 4 the Future of AI?

Prime Highlights

  • Meta’s Llama 4 models, Scout and Maverick, have allegedly been outperforming ChatGPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 in benchmarks.
  • Meta’s assistant powered by Llama has won 400 million monthly active users, competing against OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Key Facts

  • Meta has introduced the Llama 4 models, namely Scout and Maverick, that have been seen performing better compared to ChatGPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 in many benchmarks.
  • Llama 4 Scout is especially effective, accommodating a single Nvidia H100 GPU, whereas Maverick performs better in reasoning and coding.
  • CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed these new models on Instagram, and two more models—Llama 4 Reasoning and Llama 4 Behemoth—are expected in the near future.

Major Background

Meta Platforms, controlled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has increasingly emerged as one of the major players in the artificial intelligence (AI) space. In July 2024, Meta released Llama 3.1, an open-source AI model that surpassed GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on a number of performance benchmarks. The model was trained on a vast dataset of over 15 trillion tokens using over 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, an achievement that made it one of the strongest open-source AI models in existence at the time.

Capitalizing on this success, Meta introduced its Llama 4 series, which features Scout and Maverick models. Llama 4 Scout is especially known for its efficiency, capable of fitting on a single Nvidia H100 GPU, while Maverick has posted impressive scores in reasoning and coding tests. These developments have placed Meta’s AI technology firmly as a contender against current models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini series.

But Meta’s experience with AI has not always been controversy-free. The company has been at the center of criticism regarding benchmarking, most notably after discovering that the testing version of Maverick used to test on the LMArena leaderboard was an optimized variant prepared for conversational performance, and not the general public release. This has questioned transparency in benchmarking. Meta pushed back against these allegations by justifying its method as something that happens regularly in the industry and insisting it did not do anything illegal in terms of training on test sets.

As much as Meta has faced opposition, its advancements in AI have made the competition for AI greater. Interestingly, the 2025 AI Index pointed out China’s DeepSeek, which is becoming a serious contender in the world of AI through its R1 model, though it suffers from constraints thanks to U.S. export restrictions on high-performance computing resources. The Index further mentioned that though the U.S. is still ahead in terms of the development of popular AI models, China is leading when it comes to AI paper publication and patent filings, an indicator of the globalized nature of the AI race.

In short, Meta’s ongoing innovation of its Llama AI series makes the company a major player in the AI industry. Despite its challenges with benchmarking and transparency, its innovations are helping shape the fast-changing AI environment.