I am no fan of Wang but he came after Llama got caught benchmaxxing Llama 4 rather than training a good model. My read is that Zuckerberg tried to buy his way out of the problem like he always does, and he ended up overpaying for a lemon.
replyAt the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun who seemed to spend more time arguing with people on Twitter than figuring out new techniques to make Llama the best. Meanwhile Deepseek was figuring out large scale RL on kneecapped hardware like H800s and how to scale architectures an order of magnitude bigger with MoE.
Meta had the resource curse just like with Metaverse and VR headsets.
replyMeanwhile Chinese labs were forced to innovate with more efficient models.
> At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun
replyHe was not in charge of the Meta LLM stuff, from anything i've read over the past few years.
He was their “chief AI scientist” (what an abomination of a title) and led FAIR. Maybe it’s true he was not working on LLMs but I can’t even imagine what more important thing he could be doing at Meta.
replyWhich brings me to my other point. If you want to compete with serious labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Alibaba) you need to be smart and focused, not messing around.
Don't think it is down to Wang or MSL but Meta's focus on "personal AI" led them to whatever strategy (OAI missed the developer market too, which Ant then captured; leading to several high profile departures at OAI, coincidentally hired from Meta). The original Llama team themselves started Mistral which hasn't gone anywhere. The simple fact of the matter here is, Chinese firms have the money and the talent to rival the US ones in this field, should they as much miss a beat.
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