2 weeks Ago
Meta has officially released two advanced AI models Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout taking a major step toward competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The announcement follows OpenAI’s recent rollout of image generation within ChatGPT, which has gone viral for producing photorealistic visuals, especially with the trending Studio Ghibli-style images. According to Meta, Llama 4 Maverick currently has an edge over OpenAI’s GPT-4o in several critical areas, including coding, reasoning, multilingual capabilities, long context processing, and image-related benchmarks.
The LMarena leaderboard shows Llama 4 Maverick outperforming both GPT-4o and GPT-4.5 Preview at the time of writing, ranking just behind Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental).
However, these benchmark results are often changing, and real-world usage is the most accurate test. Meta also claims that Llama 4 Maverick does exceptionally well in creative writing and precise image generation. Still, there is no definitive proof unless users test both ChatGPT and Llama 4 side by side across varied queries over time.
Although Meta’s new models are natively multimodal, meaning they can understand and respond to image-based prompts, this feature is currently limited to the United States and only in English. There is no official word yet on when this will expand to other regions. In contrast, ChatGPT’s image generation is more advanced and globally accessible.
Users can create contextual and photorealistic images and even edit uploaded images in different styles, making it one of the best free AI image generators currently available. Despite being a big upgrade over Meta’s earlier versions, Llama 4 Maverick still falls short in several areas compared to ChatGPT. One major gap is the lack of a dedicated reasoning model.
While OpenAI’s GPT-4o and others like DeepSeek R1 include reasoning capabilities which mimic human-like thought to solve complex problems Meta hasn’t released this feature yet. The company is expected to announce a Llama 4 Reasoning model during LlamaCon on April 29. It’s also worth noting that Llama 4 Maverick is not the top-tier model in Meta’s pipeline.
That title belongs to Llama 4 Behemoth, which is still under development and will aim to rival GPT-4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 once released.
OpenAI recently introduced Deep Research mode in ChatGPT, which conducts web searches to provide research assistant-level answers. While results may vary, this feature has already been adopted by other platforms like Perplexity AI, Grok, and Google Gemini, showing its growing importance in advanced AI tools. Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick is currently free to use without restrictions, including for image generation tasks.
It is integrated into platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, making it more accessible to the general public without needing a separate app or account. On the other hand, OpenAI limits the use of its latest models. After a few messages, ChatGPT free users are shifted to an older version.
Also, only three images can be generated per day, and users must register on the OpenAI website or app to access the chatbot. Meta’s Llama 4 Maverick and Scout offer powerful features and free access, but limitations in reasoning and regional restrictions on multimodal abilities mean ChatGPT still holds the upper hand in global usability and advanced tools like Deep Research. However, with Meta’s upcoming models and features, the AI chatbot competition is heating up.
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