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.

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.