Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNETLast month, Meta hosted its first generative AI developer conference, LlamaCon, where it planned to release the “Behemoth” large language model. Instead, the company pushed the release to June, and now, a new report suggests it might slip further — to the fall or later.Also: The top 20 AI tools – and the #1 thing to remember when you use themAccording to The Wall Street Journal, Meta engineers are “struggling to significantly improve the capabilities” of Behemoth. That’s especially interesting given that, just weeks ago, Meta claimed Behemoth is still in training and yet already “outperforms” all major competitors — including GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro — on several STEM benchmarks. Concerns are brewing Large language models (LLMs) power AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Meta AI, processing prompts on the fly and generating human-like text in response. Behemoth was billed as Meta’s “most powerful yet” LLM — “one of the smartest in the world” — and meant to serve as a “teacher” for future models. That’s the public story; internally, concerns are brewing. Also: Meta’s new AI app delivers a chatbot with a social media twistInside Meta, engineers reportedly worry that Behemoth does not offer enough of an improvement over existing models to “justify” a public release. Keep in mind: Meta released Llama 4 in April. (Llama, short for Large Language Model Meta AI, is Meta’s family of LLMs.) To date, two smaller Llama 4 variants, Scout and Maverick, are available, and Meta has teased another lightweight version. ZDNET requested a comment from Meta and will update this article if a representative responds. More
