Llama 4 Maverick and Scout challenge top AI benchmarks

Mark Zuckerberg says Llama 4 is a major step in making open-source AI the global standard.
Meta’s Maverick model soared in rankings, but it wasn’t the version made public—raising concerns about transparency and benchmark integrity.

Meta has officially launched two of its new Llama 4 AI models, Maverick and Scout, following reported delays earlier in the year.

The release forms part of Meta’s wider ambition to build and open-source the world’s most powerful AI systems. Llama 4 Behemoth, another model announced alongside them, has yet to become available.

The newly released models go head-to-head with Google’s latest AI offerings. According to Meta, Llama 4 Maverick surpasses Gemini 2.0 (Flash) in benchmarks such as coding, reasoning, and image tasks, while Llama 4 Scout outperforms both Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite and Gemma 3 in summarisation and code analysis.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai offered unexpected congratulations to the Llama 4 team on social media, reflecting the high-profile nature of the launch.

Llama 4 Maverick features 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts, making it a versatile choice for general-purpose AI assistants and creative tasks.

Llama 4 Scout shares the same number of active parameters but with a leaner expert setup, tailored for more focused tasks like document summarisation and code reasoning. Meta plans to release additional advanced models, including Llama Behemoth and Llama Reasoning, in the near future.

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