Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks
theverge.com
theverge.com
This is about what I expected, but it makes you wonder what they're going to do next. At this point it looks like they are falling behind the other open models, and made an ambitious bet on MoEs, without this paying off.
Did Zuck push for the release? I'm sure they knew it wasn't ready yet.
Also from what I can tell this performs better than models with parameter counts equal to one expert, and worse than fully dense models equal to total parameter count. Isn't that kind of what we'd expect? in what way is that a failure?
Maybe I am missing some details. But it feels like you have an axe to grind.
My response would be, "so why bother with MOE?"
However deepseek r1 is MOE from my understanding, but the "E" are all =>32B parameters. There's > 20 experts. I could be misinformed; however, even so, I'd say a MOE with 32B or even 70B experts will outperform (define this!) Models with equal parameter counts, because deepseek outperforms (define?) ChatGPT et al.
A deepseek employee is welcome to correct me.
A model includes many components. There will be bits that encode/decode tokens as vectors, transformer blocks which do the actual processing on the data, some post-transformer block filtering to normalize that output, and maybe some other stuff depending on the model architecture. The part we're interested in involves parts of the transformer blocks, which handle using encoded relational information about the vectors involved (part 1) to transform the input vector using a feed forward network of weights (part 2) and then all that gets post processed in various ways (part 3). A model will chain these transformers together and each part of the chain is called a layer. A vector will run from the first layer through to the last, being modified by each transformer along the way.
In an MoE model the main part about the transformer block changed is part 2, which goes from "using a feed forward network of weights" to "using a subset of feed forward network weights chosen by a router for the given token and then recombined". In the MoE case each subset of weights per feed forward layer is what is called the "expert". Importantly, the expert is not a whole model - it's just a group of the weights available in a given layer. Each layer's router choses which group(s) of weights to use independently. As an example, if a 10 layer model had a total of 10 billion 8 bit parameters in the feed forward layers (so a >10 billion parameter model in overall parameters) and 10 experts that means each expert is ~100 MB (10 billion bytes / 10 layers / 10 experts per layer). These 10 billion parameters would be referred to as the sparse parameters (not always used each token) while the rest of the model would be referred to as the dense parameters (always used each token). Note: folks on the internet have a strong tendency to label this incorrectly as "10x1B" or "10x{ActiveParameters}" instead.
The "Mixture" part of MoE extends a bit further than "the parameter groups sit next to each other in the transformer block" though. Similar in concept to how transformer attention is combined in part 1, more than 1 expert can be activated and the outputs combined. At minimum there is usually 1 expert which is always used in a layer (the "shared expert") and at least 1 expert which is selected by the router (the "routed experts"). The shared expert exists to make the utilization of the routed experts more even by ensuring base information which needs to be used all the time is dedicated to it which increases training performance since the other experts can be more evenly selected by the router as a result.
With that understanding, the important takeaways are:
- Experts are parts of individual parameter networks in each layer, not a sub-model carved out.
- More than 1 expert can be used, and the way the data is combined is not like feeding the output of a low parameter LLM to another, it's more like how the first phase of the transformer has multiple attention heads which are combined to give the full attention information.
- There are a lot of other weights beyond the sparse weights used by experts in a model. The same is true for the equivalent portions of a dense model as well though. This ultimately makes comparing active parameters of a sparse model to total parameters of a dense model a valid comparison.
As to the original conversation: DeepSeek v3/R1 has 37 Billion active parameters so that should set the floor for a comparative dense model, not whatever the size of an individual expert in part of a single transformer layer is (which acts as a bit of a red herring in these kinds of conversations, doubly so since more than 1 experts worth of weights are used anyways). In reality a bit more than that, though definitely less than if all 671 Billion parameters were dense. While we don't have much concrete public information about modern version of ChatGPT, one thing we're relatively certain of is "ChatGPT 4.5 has a TON more parameters and has basically nothing to show for it". Meanwhile Gemma 3, a 27 B locally runnable model from Google, is a hair behind DeepSeek v3 in many popular benchmarks. Truth is, there are just a lot of other things beyond parameter count that go into making a well performing model and DeepSeek v3/r1 hit (or invented) a lot of them. If I had to place a bet on this whole comparison, I'd say OpenAI is very likely also using sparse/MoE-style architectures in their current products anyways.
As a final note, don't just dismiss the architecture of DeepSeek with "regardless of what they put in the paper"! The model files are available and they include this sort of layer/parameter information so your device is able to run them (well, "run" requires a bit of RAM in this case... but you can still read the model file on disk and see it's laid out as the paper claims regardless).
Despite connotations of specialized intelligences the term "expert" provokes it's really mostly about scalability/efficiency of running large models. By splitting up sections of the layers and not activating all of them for each pass a single query takes less bandwidth, can be distributed across compute, and can be parallelized with other queries on the same nodes.
Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features and move to another project. Quality isn't rewarded at all. The recent layoffs have made things even worse. Skilled people were fired, slowing down teams. I assume the goal was to push remaining employees to work even more, but I doubt this is working.
I haven't worked in enough companies of this size to be able to tell if alternatives are better, but it's very clear to me that Meta doesn't get the best from their employees.
> Move fast and break things
is really a bad concept in this space, where you get limited shots at releasing something that generates interest.
> Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features
And this is why I never liked that motto and have always pushed back at startups where I was hired that embraced this line of thought. Quality matters. It's context-dependent, so sometimes it matters a lot, and sometimes hardly. But "moving fast and breaking things" should be a deliberate choice, made for every feature, module, sprint, story all over again, IMO. If at all.
Sure, but long term effects are more depending on the actual performance of the model, than anything.
Say they launch a model that is hyped to be the best, but when people try it, it's worse than other models. People will quickly forget about it, unless it's particularly good at something.
Alternatively, say they launch a model that doesn't even get a press release, or any benchmark results published ahead of launch, but the model actually rocks at a bunch of use cases. People will start using it regardless of the initial release, and continue to do so as long as it's a best model.
It's a really bad concept in any space.
We would be living in a better world if Zuck had, at least once, thought "Maybe we shouldn't do that".
I struggle with this because it feels like so many 'rules' in the world where the important half remains unsaid. That unsaid portion is then mediated by goodharts law.
If the other half is 'then slow down and learn something' its really not that bad, nothing is sacred, we try we fail we learn we (critical) don't repeat the mistake. Thats human learning - we don't learn from mistakes we learn from reflecting on mistakes.
But if learning isn't part of the loop - if its a self justifying defense for fuckups, if the unsaid remains unsaid, its a disaster waiting to happen.
The difference is usually in what you reward. If you reward ship, you get the defensive version - and you will ship crap. If you reward institutional knowledge building you don't. Engineers are often taught that 'good, fast, or cheap pick 2'. The reality is its usually closer to 1 or 1.5. If you pick fast...you get fast.
Maybe the fact that this is how I understood that motto is in itself telling.
Yes, "shipped, but terrible software" is far more valuable than "perfect software that's not available". But that's a goal.
The "move fast and break things" is a means to that goal. One of many ways to achieve this. In this, "move fast" is evident: who would ever want to move slowly if moving fast has the exact same trade-offs?
"Break things" is the part that I truly dislike. No. We don't "break things" for our users, our colleagues or our future-selves (ie tech debt).
In other situations, the "move fast and break things" implies a preferred leaning towards low-quality in the famous "Speed / Cost / Quality Trade-off". Where, by decreasing quality, we gain speed (while keeping cost the same?).
This fallacy has long been debunked, with actual research and data to back it up¹: Software Engineering projects that focus on quality, actually gain speed! Even without reading research or papers, this makes sense: we all know how much time is wasted on fixing regressions, muddling through technical debt, rewriting unreadable/-manageable/-extensible code etc. A clean, well-maintained, neatly tested, up-to-date codebase allows one to add features much faster than that horrible ball of mud that accumulated hacks and debt and bugs for decades.
¹e.g. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations is a nice starting point with lots of references to research and data on this.
I think the performance-based management worked for a while because there were some gains to be had by pushing people harder. However, they’ve gone past that and are now pushing people too hard and getting worse results. Every machine has its operating limits and an area where it operates most efficiently. A company is no different.
This is true if they are just being observed, or if some novel new processes are introduced. If the new things are beneficial, the performance rises for 4-8 weeks as usual, but when it regresses it regresses to a higher performance reflecting the value of the new process.
But when poor management introduce a counter-productive change, the Hawthorne Effect makes it look like a resounding success for 4-8 weeks. Then the effect fades, and performance drops below the original level. Sufficiently devious managers either move on to new projects or blame the workers for failing to maintain the new higher pace of performance.
This explains a lot of the incentive for certain types of leaders to champion arbitrary changes, take a victory lap, and then disassociate themselves from accountability for the long-term success or failure of their initiative.
(There is quite a bit of controversy over what the mechanisms for the Hawthorne Effect are, and whether change alone can introduce it for whether participants need to feel they are being observed, but the model as I see it fits my anecdotal experience where new processes are always accompanied by attempts to meet new performance goals, and everyone is extremely aware that the outcome is being measured.)
My vote is change alone can introduce it; going from not being observed to observed is a change itself. People get into a daily groove after adjusting to whatever circumstance or process (maybe that averages 4-8 weeks I have no idea), but introduce a novel thing into that and they "perk up" until that bit leaves or integrates into the daily groove. In my experience, people prefer working on new features, even if that feature is some managements arbitrary initiative. They rather work on that new ridiculous thing than continue on their previous slog through the bug backlog until the new thing becomes a slog itself.
Maybe there is more to that. It's been more than a year since Llama 3 was released. That should be enough time for Meta to release something with significantly improvement. Or you mean quarter by quarter the engineers had to show that they were making impact in their perf review, which could be detrimental to the Llama 4 project?
Another thing that puzzles me is that again and again we see that the quality of a model can improve if we have more high-quality data, yet can't Meta manage to secure massive amount of new high-quality data to boost their model performance?
This is what I think they were referencing. Launching things looks nice in review packets and few to none are going to look into the quality of the output. Submitting your own self review means that you can cherry pick statistics and how you present them. That's why that culture incentivizes launching half baked products and moving on to something else because it's smart and profitable (launch yet another half baked project) to distance yourself from the half baked project you started.
> employees that all they needed to do is deliver what the company wanted
How did this work out in practice and across teams? My experience at Meta within my team was that it would be almost impossible to determine what the company actually wanted from our team in a year. Goals kept changing and the existing incentive system works against this since other teams are trying to come up with their own solutions to things which may impact your team.
> an employee did their job and didn't move up
Does Netflix cull employees if they haven't reached a certain IC level? I know at Meta SWEs need to reach IC5 after a while or risk being culled.
> How did this work out in practice and across teams? My experience at Meta within my team was that it would be almost impossible to determine what the company actually wanted from our team in a year.
That's why it is critical to have good leaders. A problem, at least per my own experience in Meta, is that many managers are people managers. I'm not sure what they want. It's hard to know what product they want to build, what gaps they want to fill, or what efficiency goals they want to drive. If they were in Netflix, they would fail the "setting the right context" test, as they didn't know what the right context should be.
You're not encouraged per se to ship half-baked features, but if you don't have enough "impact" at the end of the half (for mid cycle checkin) or year (for full PSC cycle) then you're going to get "Below Expectations" and then "Meets Most" (or worse) and with the current environment a swift offboarding.
When I was there (working in integrity) our group of staff+ engineers opined how it led to perverse incentives - and whilst you can work there and do great work, and get good ratings, I saw too many examples of "optimizing for PSC" (otherwise known as PSC hacking).
That's a terrible way to execute on big, ambitious projects since it discourages risky bets and discourages collaboration.
They're just gonna keep throwing money at it. This is a hobby and talent magnet for them, instagram is the money printer. They've been working on VR for like a decade with barely much results in terms of users (compared to costs). This will be no different.
One of Meta's biggest strengths is Zuckerberg being able to play these kinds of bets. Those bets being great for PR and talent acquisition is the cherry on top
Companies become complacent and confused when they get too big. Employees become trapped in a maze of performative careerism, and customer focus and a realistic understanding of threats from potential competitors both disappear.
It's been a consistent pattern since the earliest days of computing.
Nothing coming out of Big Tech at the moment is encouraging me to revise that assumption.
All I know is it is the first Llama release since Zuck brought "masculine energy" back to Meta.
Imagine this but you remove the noise and can walk like in an art gallery (it's a diffusion model but LLMs can be loosely converted into 3D maps with objects, too): https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/07/generative-ai-sp...
Many sites repost those photos, I doubt Meta will care to meticulously remove them. If the model can generate photo-like content of people - it had photos of people put inside.
I doubt they only trained on public domain photos of people.
If they started doing shady stuff, why would they ever stop?
[1]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmarena-ai/Llama-4-Maverick-03...
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/19/ai-benchmarking-organizati...
Is anything here actually false or do you not like the conclusions that people may draw from it?
From a primary source:
"OpenAI did not use FrontierMath data to guide the development of o1 or o3, at all.... we only downloaded FrontierMath for our evals long after the training data was frozen, and only looked at o3 FrontierMath results after the final announcement checkpoint was already picked."
> If an MMLU question asks about an abstract algebra proof, is it cheating to have trained on papers about abstract algebra?
This kind of disingenuous bullshit is exactly why people call you cheaters.
> Generally, I don’t think anyone here is cheating and I think we’re relatively diligent with our evals.
You guys should follow Apple's cult guidelines: never stand out. Think different
"OpenAI did not use FrontierMath data to guide the development of o1 or o3, at all.... we only downloaded FrontierMath for our evals long after the training data was frozen, and only looked at o3 FrontierMath results after the final announcement checkpoint was already picked."
From a primary source:
"OpenAI did not use FrontierMath data to guide the development of o1 or o3, at all.... we only downloaded FrontierMath for our evals long after the training data was frozen, and only looked at o3 FrontierMath results after the final announcement checkpoint was already picked."
These ML benchmarks were never going to last very long. There is far too much pressure to game them, even unintentionally.
According to the article, Meta publicly stated, right below the benchmark comparison, that the version of Llama on LMArena was the experimental chat version:
> According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality”
The AI benchmark in question, LMArena, compares Llama 4 experimental to closed models like ChatGPT 4o latest, and Llama performs better (https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard).
I thought there was an aspect where you run two models on the same user-supplied query. Surely this can't be gamed?
> “optimized for conversationality”
I don't understand what that means - how it gives it an LMArena advantage.
Random people ask random stuff and then it measures how good they feel. This is only a worthwhile evaluation if you're Google or Meta or OpenAI and you need to make a chartbot that keeps people coming back. It doesn't measure anything else useful.
At this point, when I look at the output from my Gemini-2.5-pro sessions, they are so high quality, and take so long to read, and check, and have an informed opinion on, I just can't trust the slapdash approach of LMArena in assuming that careless driveby maybe-didn't-even-read-the-responses-ain't-no-one-got-time-for-that-nerd-shit ratings mean much of anything. There have been red flags in the past and I've been taking them ever less seriously even as one of many benchmarks since early last year, but maybe this is the biggest backfire yet. And it's only going to get worse. At this rate, without major overhaul, you should take being #1 on LMArena seriously as useful and important news - as a reason to not use a model.
It's past time for LMArena people to sit down and have some thorough reflection on whether it is still worth running at all, and at what point they are doing more harm than good. No benchmark lives forever and it is normal and healthy to shut them down at some point after having been saturated, but some manage to live a lot longer than they should have...
As an aside, I like getting two responses from two models that I can compare against one another (and with the primary sources of truth that I know a priori). Not only does that help me sanity-check the responses somewhat, but I get to interact with new models that I wouldn't have otherwise had the opportunity to. Learning new stuff is good, and being earnest is good.
_nick
(Last I checked 1 month ago)
It was a really strange situation that lasted for months. Posts or comments with a direct link were removed like they were the worst of the worst.
I tried posting to r/bugs and it was downvoted immediately. I eventually contacted he lmarena folks, so maybe they resolved it with reddit.
... We're also hearing some reports of mixed quality across different services ...
We've also heard claims that we trained on test sets -- that's simply not true and we would never do that. Our best understanding is that the variable quality people are seeing is due to needing to stabilize implementations.
We believe the Llama 4 models are a significant advancement and we're looking forward to working with the community to unlock their value.
Meta is always the worst so I don't even bother anymore.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/01/metas-head-of-ai-research-an...
Zuck doesn't buy it, either. He just knows what's good for business right now.
In an example of the worst person you know making a great point, Josh Hawley said "What really struck me is that they can read an election return." [0].
Though it's worth remembering, it's very difficult to accumulate the volume of data necessary to do the current kind of AI training while sticking to the strictest interpretations of EU privacy law. Social media companies aren't just feeding the user data into marketing algorithms, they're feeding them into AI models. If you're a leading researcher in that field - Like Le Cun - and the current state-of-the-art means getting as much data as possible, you might not appreciate the regulatory environment of the EU.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/27/nx-s1-5302712/senator-josh-ha...
What I suspect will happen is that someone will just tell the LLM to "be curt" that may cause it's score to drop and people will unthinkingly take that to mean the above nonsensical claims are true.
This is the culture of META hurting them, they are paying "AI VPs" millions of dollars to go to status meetings to get dates for when these models will be done. Meanwhile, deepseek r1 has a flat hierarchy with engineers that actually understand low level computing
Its making a mockery of big tech, and is why startups exist. Big company employees rise the ranks by building skill sets other than producing true economic value
You haven't been keeping up. Less than 2 weeks ago, Google released a model that has crushed the competition, clearly being SotA while currently effectively free for personal use.
Gemini 2.0 was already good, people just weren't paying attention. In fact 1.5 pro was already good, and ironically remains the #1 model at certain very specific tasks, despite being set for deprecation in September.
Google just suffered from their completely botched initial launch way back when (remember Bard?), rushed before the product was anywhere near ready, making them look lile a bunch of clowns compared to e.g. OpenAI. That left a lasting impression on those who don't devote significant time to keeping up with newer releases.
Gemini subscription? Surely if you're "using LLMs correctly" you'd have been using the APIs for everything anyway. Subscriptions are generally for non-techy consumers.
In any case, just straight up saying "it isn't good" is absurd, even if you personally prefer others.
There is no system to pitch an idea as opening new frontiers - all ideas must be able to optimize some number that leadership has already been tricked into believing is important.
If Mark, both through Meta and through his own resources, has the capital to hire and retain the best AI researchers / teams, and claims he's doing so, but puts out a model that sucks, he's liable. It's probably not directly fraud, but if he claims he's trying to compete with Google or Microsoft or Apple or whoever, yet doesn't adequately deploy a comparable amount of resources, capital, people, whatever, and doesn't explain why, it could (stretch) be securities fraud....I think.
It's only because lying ("puffery") about everything has become the norm in corporate America that indeed, almost all listed companies commit securities fraud. If they'd go back to being honest businessmen, no more securities fraud. Just stop claiming things that aren't true. This is a very real option they could take. If they don't, then they're willingly and knowingly commiting securities fraud. But the meme makes it sound to people as if it's unavoidable, when it's anything but.
The goal is long term control over a technology's marketshare, as winner take all dynamics are in play here.
> Critics have pointed out that xAI’s approach involves running Grok 3 multiple times and cherry-picking the best output while comparing it against single runs of competitor models.
[1] https://medium.com/@cognidownunder/the-hype-machine-gpt-4-5-...
They have vowed not to make that mistake again so are pushing for an open future that won't be dominated by a few companies that could arbitrarily hurt Meta's business.
That's the stated rationale at least and I think it more or less makes sense
The old joke is they're losing money on every sale but they'll make up for it in volume.
None of the models Meta put out are actually open source (by any measure), and everyone who are redistributing Llama models or any derivatives, or use Llama models for their business, are on the hook of getting sued in the future based on the terms and conditions people been explicitly/implicitly agreeing to when they use/redistribute these models.
If you start depending on these Llama models which have unfavorable proprietary terms today but Meta don't act on them, doesn't mean they won't act on it in the future. Maybe this has all been a play to get people into this position, so Meta can in the future start charging for them or something else.
This has happened many times before in US history.
Every other player: Black Forest Labs' Flux, Stability.ai's Stable Diffusion, and even closed models like Ideogram and Midjourney, are all on the path to extinction.
Image generation and editing must be multimodal. Full stop.
Google Imagen will probably be the first model to match the capabilities of 4o. I'm hoping one of the open weights labs or Chinese AI giants will release a model that demonstrates similar capabilities soon. That'll keep the race neck and neck.
Although the Ghibli trend is market validation, I suspect that competitors may not want to copy it just yet.
If you factor in the amount of time wasted with prompting and inpainting, it's extremely well worth it.