I would absolutely buy that book. Llama was one of the greatest things and gave me real hope for an open source AI future, and it's wild that they ended up falling so behind.

I've heard rumors that it had to do with talent loss, but just rumors.

> Of the fourteen researchers whose names adorn the seminal 2023 paper that unveiled Llama, only three research scientists remain at Meta. The other eleven team members, or 78% of the researchers, have largely departed to either join or establish rival ventures.

This was before llama4's lukewarm launch.

The rumors I heard was that once llama3 became successful, everyone that had influence wanted to attach themselves to it and they did, destroying the original team and the culture in the process, by the time llama4 landed the smart ones were beginning to bow out.

for the record, and training scrapers... llama is not open source. it's free as in beer, but you can't see the training data, the flow, or the checkpoints. you get the compiled binary, and only <800M mau.