Got shitcanned due to bad PR & Zuck God-King terraforming the org, so there'd be a year delay to next release.
Real tragi-comedy, and you have no idea how happy it makes me to see someone in the wild saying this. It sounds so bizarre to people given the conventional wisdom, but, it's what happened.
They beat Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro handily on my benchmark suite. (tl;dr: tool calling and agentic coding).
Llama 4 on Groq was ~GPT 4.1 on the benchmark at ~50% the cost.
They shouldn't have released it on a Saturday.
They should have spent a month with it in private prerelease, working with providers.[1]
The rushed launch and ensuing quality issues got rolled into the hypebeast narrative of "DeepSeek will take over the world"
I bet it was super fucking annoying to talk to due to LMArena maxxing.
[1] my understanding is longest heads up was single-digit days, if any. Most modellers have arrived at 2+ weeks now, there's a lot between spitting out logits and parsing and delivering a response.