Meta releases Llama 4 Scout and Maverick
Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick, its first natively multimodal mixture-of-experts open-weight models, with Scout offering a 10M-token context window; the launch was marred by controversy over an experimental version used on LMArena.
Key facts
- Released 5 April 2025
- Scout: 17B active parameters, 16 experts, 10M-token context
- Maverick: 17B active parameters, 128 experts
- Llama 4 Behemoth previewed as a teacher model, not released
- Meta later reorganized its AI efforts into Meta Superintelligence Labs (mid-2025)
What happened
Meta shipped a new MoE generation of Llama with very long context, but reception was lukewarm relative to Chinese open models.
Why it matters
Signaled Meta's loss of open-weights leadership to Chinese labs (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi) and precipitated its superintelligence reorganization.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Llama 3.1 405B: the first frontier-class open-weights model ★★★★
- DeepSeek-R1: open-weights reasoning model rivals o1 and shakes markets ★★★★★
Sources (2)
id: 2025-04-05-llama-4 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline