‘Never a dull day in AI’: Sundar Pichai reacts as Meta launches Llama 4 models to take on Gemini

After reportedly delaying its latest AI range for a few months, Meta unveiled its new Llama models on Saturday. While the company introduced three models: Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Behemoth - only two are currently available.

Soon after the announcement of Meta's Llama 4 AI models, Meta AI got an unexpected congratulatory message from Google CEO Sundar Pichai who in a post on X wrote, “Never a dull day in the AI world! Congrats to the Llama 4 team, Onwards!”

Notably, Meta's new AI models compete directly with Google's offerings. For example, Meta claims that Llama 4 Maverick outperforms Gemini 2.0 (Flash) in coding, reasoning, multilingual, long context and image benchmarks, while Llama 4 Scout is said to deliver better results than Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite and Gemma 3 models.

Additionally, Meta's upcoming models such as Llama Behemoth and Llama Reasoning will also compete directly with Google's leading offerings.

All you need to know about Llama 4 models:

Outlining the ambitions for Llama 4 models, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a video on Instagram said, “Our goal is to build the world's leading ai, open source it, and make it universally accessible so that everyone in the world benefits. and i've said for a while that i think that open source ai is going to become the leading models, and with a lot with llama 4 this is starting to happen.”

Lama 4 Maverick comes with 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts. Meta says Maverick is a "product workhorse model for general assistant and chat use cases" and is ideal for precise image understanding and creative writing tasks.

Meanwhile, Llama 4 Scout has 17 billion active parameters, 16 experts and 109 billion total parameters. The smaller Llama 4 model is said to excel at tasks such as summarising documents and reasoning over code bases.