Meta Reported to Push Back Launch of Flagship AI Model

TMTPOST -- Meta Platforms, Inc. shares tumbled as much as 3.2% following a report about possible delaying launch of the company’s flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model, and settled around 2.4% lower on Thursday.

Credit：Meta

Meta is pushing back rollout of its large language model (LLM) dubbed “Behemoth” under its Llama 4 family due to concerns about its capabilities, the Wall Street Journal cited people familiar with the matter on Thursday.it was reported that Meta engineers are struggling to substantially improve capabilities of the model, stirring questions among the staff about if improvements over its predecessor versions are significant enough to justify public statements about its capabilities.

Meta didn’t respond to the report. If it is accurate, the social media titan has so far postponed its planned release of the Behemoth model twice. Early in the development of the model, the company was said to internally arrange the release in April to coincide with its inaugural AI conference for developers, but later delayed the internal target of rollout to June, and the current target became fall or even later.

Meta unveiled the first models in the Llama herd on April 5. it said the two smaller Llama 4 models, Scout and Marverick, “are our best yet thanks to distillation from Llama 4 Behemoth” and touted Behemoth is “a 288 billion active parameter model with 16 experts that our most powerful yet and among the world’s smartest LLMs.” It said Llama 4 Behemoth outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks.

The Thursday report aroused new concerns over the effectiveness and direction of Meta’s mounting AI investments. Two weeks ago, Meta announced updated guidance and showed its determination to ramp up AI spending this year. It now sees capital expenditure (Capex) for the year be in the range of $64billion to $72 billion, increased from its prior outlook of $60billion to $65 billion. That represented a lift of more than 7%.

“This updated outlook reflects additional data center investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware,” Meta said in the earnings release.

Meta Chief Finance Officer Susan Li said the hike in expected infrastructure hardware is the result of “suppliers who source from countries around the world.” The CFO told analysts “there’s just a lot of uncertainty around this, given the ongoing trade discussions”, adding that the company is "working on our end on mitigations by optimizing our supply chain."