Meta's Llama 4 'herd' controversy and AI contamination, explained

Little Blue Wolf Productions/Getty Images Meta introduced the fourth generation of its wildly popular Llama generative artificial intelligence program, called the Llama 4 "herd," over the weekend. Almost immediately, a debate ensued that was somewhat uncharacteristic of previous releases. The herd is a collection of three different models, dubbed Behemoth, Scout, and Maverick. Meta says that Behemoth, which is still in development, will be "one of the smartest LLMs in the world" when it's done. It uses a total of two trillion neural "weights," or parameters, which would be the largest amount disclosed publicly by any researchers. Meta Platforms Behemoth was then used to create the two smaller models, Scout and Maverick, via an increasingly popular approach known as "distillation," where the heavy compute work on the larger model can be passed down to the smaller ones in order to maximize the return on investment. Also: Microsoft is offering free AI skills training for everyone - h ... Read full article.