tl;dr – Meta did a VW by using a special version of their AI which was optimised to score higher on the most important metric for AI performance.
Over the weekend, Meta dropped two new Llama 4 models: a smaller model named Scout, and Maverick, a mid-size model that the company claims can beat GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash “across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks.”
Maverick quickly secured the number-two spot on LMArena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs from different systems and vote on the best one. In Meta’s press release, the company highlighted Maverick’s ELO score of 1417, which placed it above OpenAI’s 4o and just under Gemini 2.5 Pro. (A higher ELO score means the model wins more often in the arena when going head-to-head with competitors.)
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In fine print, Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LMArena isn’t the same as what’s available to the public. According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality,” TechCrunch first reported.
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A spokesperson for Meta, Ashley Gabriel, said in an emailed statement that “we experiment with all types of custom variants.”
“‘Llama-4-Maverick-03-26-Experimental’ is a chat optimized version we experimented with that also performs well on LMArena,” Gabriel said. “We have now released our open source version and will see how developers customize Llama 4 for their own use cases. We’re excited to see what they will build and look forward to their ongoing feedback.”
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”It’s the most widely respected general benchmark because all of the other ones suck,” independent AI researcher Simon Willison tells The Verge. “When Llama 4 came out, the fact that it came second in the arena, just after Gemini 2.5 Pro — that really impressed me, and I’m kicking myself for not reading the small print.”
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Source: Meta gets caught gaming AI benchmarks with Llama 4 | The Verge
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