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Meta’s Llama 4 Model Underperforms in Benchmark After Controversy
Earlier this week, technology giant Meta encountered criticism for employing an experimental, pre-release iteration of its Llama 4 Maverick large language model to achieve a high score on the LM Arena, a crowdsourced artificial intelligence benchmark. This action prompted the maintainers of the LM Arena platform to issue an apology, revise their evaluation policies, and subsequently assess the unmodified, standard version of Maverick.
The results indicate a less competitive performance than initially suggested.
Unmodified Llama 4 Ranks Lower Than Leading AI Models
The standard Maverick model, identified as “Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct,” was positioned below several established models as of Friday, including OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro. Notably, many of these competing AI models have been available for months.
The release version of Llama 4 has been added to LMArena after it was found out they cheated, but you probably didn’t see it because you have to scroll down to 32nd place which is where is ranks pic.twitter.com/A0Bxkdx4LX
— ρ:ɡeσn (@pigeon__s) April 11, 2025
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Experimental Version Optimized for Conversational Abilities
The apparent underperformance of the standard model can be attributed to the developmental focus of Meta’s experimental Maverick, “Llama-4-Maverick-03-26-Experimental.” Meta stated in a published chart last Saturday that this version was “optimized for conversationality.” These specific optimizations appeared to resonate favorably with LM Arena’s evaluation method, which involves human evaluators comparing model outputs and selecting their preference.
Concerns Regarding Benchmark Reliability
As previously reported, LM Arena has faced questions regarding its reliability as a definitive gauge of AI model performance. Furthermore, the practice of tailoring a model specifically to excel in a particular benchmark, while potentially misleading, complicates the ability of developers to accurately predict the model’s effectiveness across diverse real-world applications and contexts.
Meta’s Response to Model Variations and Customization
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson confirmed the company routinely experiments with “all types of custom variants” of their AI models.
“‘Llama-4-Maverick-03-26-Experimental’ represents a chat-optimized version that we tested, which also demonstrated strong performance on LM Arena,” the spokesperson explained. “We have now released our open-source version and anticipate observing how developers adapt and customize Llama 4 for their individual use cases. We are eager to see the innovations they develop and value their ongoing feedback.”