Bosworth: Meta emptied its AI research pipeline to build Llama 3
Andrew Bosworth · Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth: Our Path To Frontier AI, Renting Models, Consumer AI's Struggles · Jul 8, 2026 · at 1:57
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explains why Meta lagged behind rival labs during the development gap between Llama 3 and Llama 4.
0:00 / 0:52exact quote · 52.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When we were pulling Llama three together, we had really pulled in all the research, all the every, we pulled out every single stop we had and unwittingly kind of killed the pipeline. So researchers, you know, the way that it works is you build a base And you've got people pioneering an incremental version of the base, and you've got people out there pathfinding entirely new strategies. And kind of unbeknownst to us at the time, and kind of speaks to the fact that we weren't focused enough on it LAMA III, which was a great model and was well received, to get to that model, they had kind of pulled forward all the future bets into that, to deliver that model. Well, that meant when it came time for LAMA IV, we didn't have any of the pathfinding the other labs still had going. So that makes you, now you're behind on reasoning. Now you're behind on mixture of experts. Now you're behind on a bunch of these critical technologies that have been used to continue, continue the pace of progress.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Andrew Bosworth
Bosworth: Competitors like Apple, Google, and OpenAI lack complete stacks
“And I think it is the collection of all four of those things that we see as our superpower relative to the competitors, most of whom, whether it's Apple or Anthropic OpenAI or Google, only have one of those things.”
Bosworth: Mobile Gatekeepers, Especially Apple, Stifle Meta's Application Development
“Strategically, we have just been at the mercy of platforms for since the start of the mobile era. And we were a web company, right? We were born of the web, and the web was this, like, amazing, unowned platform that you just, like really had a lot of control o…”
Bosworth: Apple's ATT Self-Preferencing Slowed Down the Games Industry
“We built a app install business and then Apple came for that with ATT, you know, a tremendous amount of kind of self-preferencing for themselves there. And in doing so, they really put a, you know, the brakes on what was a really rapidly growing part of the ga…”
Bosworth: Consumers will soon treat AI models like invisible database infrastructure
“The model itself isn't the value. And I think we're going to get to a world very soon where consumers, they don't care. They don't want to specify the model they're using. They don't want to, they don't care if it's 4.7 or 4.8. Like you don't care what Oracle,…”
Bosworth: The era of monolithic AI models ended around Llama 3
“The era of the monolithic model kind of died around Lama III launch. Like, the idea, like, here's one model, and just, like, let's just test how smart this model is, and that was how good it's going to be at lots of things. We're now in a world where when you'…”