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How is it their first try? They were leading the race with Llama 3.x a few years ago.

As far as i remember, the entire AI org was essentially gutted and replaced with whoever Wang wanted to hire, and tbh that org completely failed to train llama 4 and I honestly doubt whatever techniques they used to ship llama 3 are at all relevant now. That was before reasoning models and the heavy emphasis on RL/post-training.

so yeah, this is essentially their first try with a completely new org.

I agree with parent, Meta has been at this a long time and its only because they have recently fallen off that they pushed this "oh give us credit its really a new org" thing. Basically, if you can't actually "win" then try to fake a restart and say we are the fastest.

Even given that, this is their second try (they had Spark 1.0). Spark 1.0 was uninteresting, this is potentially interesting, but we can't really try it yet it seems (at least not in Openrouter).

Ultimately, competition is now fierce in this broad level of intelligence/cost: Spark 1.1, Grok 4.5, GPT 5.6 Luna, GLM 5.2

Sonnet not in the same ballpark of pricing (more expensive than Opus in many cases). Haiku has been basically abandoned.

They were leading the race in a niche category a few years ago. Now they are, according to some benchmarks, even on the right playing field.

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