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.

The goal of public companies is generally to generate profit for their investors.

People like to hate on Meta regardless of anything, and regardless of whether it's justified or not. Not saying it isn't, just that it's many people's default bias.

It doesn't though

Many labs aren't able to keep up with the frontier, xAI, Mistral

It’s like someone negotiating by saying, “I’ll waste even MORE money to build something worse if you don’t give me a deal.”

I’m not discounting there may be other advantages to doing it. I just don’t think negotiating is one.

Do we have data to substantiate that claim?

Do we have data to substantiate that claim?

Both Spud and Mythos can also scale via inference time compute.

Meta simply did not have enough compute online, long enough ago, to have a similar PT.

It's not just about LLMs, it's about being able to model consumers and markets and psychology and so on. Meta is also big in the manipulation side of things, any sort of cynical technological exploitation of humans you can imagine but that is technically legal, they're doing it for profit.

I can think of at least two reasons. Price and customizability. If they train their own models on their own data, they potentially have a better model at a better price, and they're not at the mercy of Anthropic's decisions when they decide to raise prices. Additionally, if you use someone else's model, you use it the way they create it and permit you to use it. In a couple years, who has any idea how these models are used. Arguably, a company the size of Meta should be in control of their AI models.

Secondly though, I think it has to do with the fact Meta is big enough to worry about vertical integration and full control of their business.

The whole reason they've been trying to make AR/VR happen for over a decade now is the assumption of a worst case and best case scenario. The worst case is Apple and Google wants them gone. This isn't as far fetched as it seems, Google has historically been Meta's biggest competitor and even tried to release its own social network back when Meta was threatening them. If either pulls Meta apps from their respective stores, it'd be an immense blow to Meta; their whole trillion-dollar business depends on competitor's platforms.

Meta tried making inroads into the phone business but failed; it is a very crowded market after all. So they changed their strategy. Instead of playing catch-up, they'd invent "the next iPhone" and be the first to a brand new market. This is the best case scenario; they invent a new platform where they can be dominant from day 1 and stop depending on competitor's hardware, not only removing that risk factor for them, but also unlocking a new market they can control.

AI ties into all this because it appears to be key for this next platform to happen. You will communicate with these smart glasses via voice, hand gestures, or subtle movements that a model will have to interpret. The features that could make them stand out as more than just a screen on your face are all AI related; object detection, world understanding, context awareness, etc. If all this were done via a 3rd party Meta would effectively be back on square one: a competitor could easily yank away its model access, or sell it to a competitor. Meta would be again at the mercy of others.

Compared to other big-tech players, I think it's easy to see how Meta is in a riskier position. There's little Google or Microsoft can do to kill the iPhone. There's little Apple or Google can do to kill Amazon's online store. There's little Amazon or Apple can do to kill Microsoft's business deals. Google and Meta are primarily in the business of capturing people's data, attention, and selling ads, and both Google and Apple could do quite some damage to Meta. Beyond expanding it, it's important for them to invest in ways to protect their money-printing machine.

Or any quality control (people missing posts)

Or banning the people who should be banned while leaving everyone else alone

This is Zuck: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198

But he has to do it anyways, otherwise Meta can be disrupted easily.

Google, Apple has hardware, distribution channels for their products

Amazon has the marketplace and cloud

Microsoft has enterprise and cloud

Meta is always looking for ways to stay afloat

They are worried something like Sora can disrupt them quickly

Not sure what this is now.

Major analytical errors in their response to multiple of my technical questions.

Especially, looking at these numbers after Claude Mythos, feels like either Anthropic has some secret sauce, or everyone else is dumber compared to the talent Anthropic has

I think it’s unrealistic to expect them to come back from that pit to the top in one year, but I wouldn’t rule them out getting there with more time. That’s a possible future. They have the money and Zuckerberg’s drive at the helm. It can go a long way.

Might as well not release anything.

If they actually matched Opus 4.6 on such a short timeline, it would have been mighty impressive. (Keep in mind this is a new lab and they are prohibited from doing distills.)

Meta's performance process is essentially "show good numbers or you're out." So guess what people do when they don't have good numbers? They fudge them. Happens all across the company.

Yup, it's called test-time compute. Mythos is described as plenty slower than Opus, enough to seriously annoy users trying to use it for quick-feedback-loop agentic work. It is most properly compared with GPT Pro, Gemini DeepThink or this latest model's "Contemplating" mode. Otherwise you're just not comparing like for like.

Why can't others easily replicate it?

"this is step one. bigger models are already in development with infrastructure scaling to match. private api preview open to select partners today, with plans to open-source future versions. incredibly proud of the MSL team. excited for what’s to come!"

https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2041909388852748717

I Googled it and found absolutely nothing.

Well, to be honest, I got 100% of websites containing the French word "boîtier" (box) with a typo.

Even on Google Scholar, the closest match is "BioTiER (Biological Training in Education and Research) Scholars Program", which is at least 10 years old and has nothing to do with that.

Is that an AI-generated image with an AI-generated name that has no physical existence?

Finding a little bit tricky to evaluate because the harness is unfortunately very, very bad (e.g. search is awful). Can't wait to try this in some real external services where we can see how it performs for real.

Definitely getting ordinary high-quality results, overall. But hard to test agentic behavior and hard to test prose quality, even, when just working off of the default chat interface.

One thing that stands out is that _for_ the quality it feels very, very fast. Perhaps it's just only very lightly loaded right now, but irrespective it's lovely to feel.

I'm quite impressed with the tone overall. It definitely feels much more like Opus than it does, like, GPT or Grok in the sense that the style is conversational, natural and enjoyable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538795

Also, I think people aren't used that using such models requires meta.ai or meta ai app.

The impressive part is multimodality, very plausible since there's less focus there by other labs (especially Anthropic)

Not my loss, will keep using DeepSeek then. Wake me up when my country is no longer in the wrong/right side of history.

The same is true with any other model, unless otherwise stated.

In the next few days, we'll see who Meta has paid to promote this model on social media.

Edit: nvm I can't read, regular benchmarks against SOTA are there

Maybe they need to mine more libra coin first? or is it diem now? is that even still part of meta?

I'm sure this new AI is super intelligent and super awesome and will be writing all the code, making all the blog posts, and generating all our youtube shorts in 6 months.

yeah, the metaverse got abandoned. Also: Meta was the only one to try the concept for the past X-umpteen years even though everyone in the industry ga-gas over virtual reality worlds and workplaces at every opportunity. It's literally Meta and Linden Labs (which has been on life support for 10+ years.)

The alternative is : no one does it and nothing gets abandoned, which the industry has shown itself to be exceedingly good at w.r.t VR for the past 40+ years.

To be clear: I have no faith in meta as a company; my problem lies in kicking an entity because they attempted something different.. I don't think that's productive, and it produces stuff like the past AI winters because groups get afraid of touching experimental concepts ever again lest they incur the wrath of the shareholder.

We keep seeing things being overhyped, with not much thought behind it. Meta is particularly bad about it. They changed their name for the hype of their VR product, when VR was still niche and had a long way to go, and still does. They couldn't even figure out legs for launch.

Now they have a 'superintellegence'? Yeah, that sounds like just the latest in a line of bullshit. Why would this be different.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diem_(digital_currency)