I am no fan of Wang but he came after Llama got caught benchmaxxing Llama 4 rather than training a good model. My read is that Zuckerberg tried to buy his way out of the problem like he always does, and he ended up overpaying for a lemon.
At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun who seemed to spend more time arguing with people on Twitter than figuring out new techniques to make Llama the best. Meanwhile Deepseek was figuring out large scale RL on kneecapped hardware like H800s and how to scale architectures an order of magnitude bigger with MoE.
Meta had the resource curse just like with Metaverse and VR headsets.
Meanwhile Chinese labs were forced to innovate with more efficient models.
> At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun
He was not in charge of the Meta LLM stuff, from anything i've read over the past few years.
He was their “chief AI scientist” (what an abomination of a title) and led FAIR. Maybe it’s true he was not working on LLMs but I can’t even imagine what more important thing he could be doing at Meta.
Which brings me to my other point. If you want to compete with serious labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Alibaba) you need to be smart and focused, not messing around.