Yann LeCun, Meta's outgoing chief AI scientist and one of the pioneers credited with laying the groundwork for modern AI, has acknowledged that the company's Llama 4 language model had its benchmark results manipulated before its April 2025 release. In an interview with the Financial Times, LeCun said the "results were fudged a little bit" and that the team "used different models for different benchmarks to give better results."
Llama 4 was widely criticized as a flop at launch, and the company faced accusations of gaming benchmarks to make the model appear more capable than it was. LeCun said CEO Mark Zuckerberg was "really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved" in the release.
Zuckerberg subsequently "sidelined the entire GenAI organisation," according to LeCun. "A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven't yet left will leave." LeCun himself is departing Meta after more than a decade to start a new AI research venture called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. He described the new hires brought in for Meta's superintelligence efforts as "completely LLM-pilled" -- a technology LeCun has repeatedly called "a dead end when it comes to superintelligence."
Llama 4 was widely criticized as a flop at launch, and the company faced accusations of gaming benchmarks to make the model appear more capable than it was. LeCun said CEO Mark Zuckerberg was "really upset and basically lost confidence in everyone who was involved" in the release.
Zuckerberg subsequently "sidelined the entire GenAI organisation," according to LeCun. "A lot of people have left, a lot of people who haven't yet left will leave." LeCun himself is departing Meta after more than a decade to start a new AI research venture called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. He described the new hires brought in for Meta's superintelligence efforts as "completely LLM-pilled" -- a technology LeCun has repeatedly called "a dead end when it comes to superintelligence."
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