Report: Meta Delays Rollout of Behemoth AI Model Amid Performance Concerns

Meta reportedly delayed the rollout of its flagship artificial intelligence model called Behemoth.

The company internally planned to release Behemoth in April, later pushed the release date to June, and has now delayed the launch at least until fall, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (May 15), citing unnamed sources.

The company has not publicly committed to a timeline for the product, the report said.

Meta did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The launch delays have been caused by struggles to improve the AI model and by concerns that the model’s performance won’t live up to that promoted in public statements, according to the report.

In public statements, Meta has said that Behemoth already outperforms similar models from Anthropic , Google and OpenAI on certain tests, per the report.

When releasing the latest versions of its Llama AI model April 5, Meta said in a press release : “We’re also previewing Llama 4 Behemoth, one of the smartest LLMs in the world and our most powerful yet to serve as a teacher for our new models.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said April 30 during a first-quarter earnings call that the company will increase its spending for AI data centers this year as it embeds the technology more deeply throughout its family of apps.

The company plans to record $64 billion to $72 billion in capital expenditures, up from $60 billion to $65 billion, while striving to meet demand for computing resources.

“The major theme right now, of course, is how AI is transforming everything we do,” Zuckerberg said. “The opportunities ahead for us are staggering. To that end, we are accelerating some of our efforts to bring capacity online more quickly this year, as well as some longer-term projects that will give us flexibility to add capacity in the coming years.”

Meta’s open-source AI models that were released April 5 — Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick — are a shot across the bow to rivals’ more expensive closed models and good news for businesses hoping to lower the cost of deploying AI, PYMNTS reported April 9.

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