Llama 4 wasn't great, but Llama 3 was.

Do we all forget how bad GPT 4.5 was?

OpenAI got out of that mess with some miraculous post-training efforts on their older GPT-4o model.

But in a different timeline we are all talking about how great Llama 4.5 is and how OpenAI needs to recover from the GPT 4.5 debacle.

As a counterpoint, I found GPT 4.5 by far the most interesting model from OpenAI in terms of depth and width of knowledge, ability to make connections and inferences and apply those in novel ways.

It didn't bench well against the other benchmaxxed models, and it was too expensive to run, but it was a glimpse of the future where more capable hardware will lead to appreciably smarter models.