How Meta Went From Open Source Hero to AI's Biggest Villain

In 2023, Meta did something no other AI lab had the guts to do. They gave a frontier model away for free. Two years and a billion downloads later, they destroyed the trust they'd built in a single weekend. This is the story of Llama.

🔗 LINKS / SOURCES

Yann LeCun's Financial Times interview:
https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2
Free summary of the FT interview:
https://the-decoder.com/you-certainly-dont-tell-a-researcher-like-me-what-to-do-says-lecun-as-he-exits-meta-for-his-own-startup/
Nathan Lambert's breakdown of the Llama 4 release:
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/llama-4
DeepSeek V3 Technical Report:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437
Original LLaMA paper (Touvron et al., Feb 2023):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13971
Aider polyglot benchmark leaderboard:
https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
Aider polyglot benchmark writeup:
https://aider.chat/2024/12/21/polyglot.html
OpenAI gpt-oss announcement:
https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/
TechCrunch on the unmodified Maverick ranking #32 on LM Arena:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/11/metas-vanilla-maverick-ai-model-ranks-below-rivals-on-a-popular-chat-benchmark/
Meta's official Llama 4 launch post:
https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/

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⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 The model that broke the rules
00:59 Early 2023: the closed-AI consensus
02:17 LLaMA 1 leaks to 4chan
03:18 Llama 2 goes properly open
04:17 Llama 3 and 3.1 become the open-source default
05:50 DeepSeek changes the math
07:22 The pressure to ship Llama 4
08:21 Enter Yann LeCun (and Alex Wang)
09:24 Saturday, April 5, 2025 — Llama 4 drops
10:38 The community finds the cracks
12:10 The LM Arena submission
13:02 The benchmark-blending allegations
13:42 Zuckerberg's reckoning
14:46 Meta Superintelligence Labs
15:53 LeCun watches FAIR get dismantled
19:34 LeCun leaves — and talks
21:27 What Meta actually lost
22:46 The open-source race moves on
24:07 The real takeaway