Meta’s open-source Llama models helped define the company’s AI strategy. Yet the researchers who built the original version have mostly moved on.
Of the 14 authors credited on the landmark 2023 paper that introduced Llama to the world, just three still work at Meta: research scientist Hugo Touvron, research engineer Xavier Martinet, and technical program leader Faisal Azhar. The rest have left the company, many of them to join or found its emerging rivals.
Meta’s brain drain is most visible at Mistral, the Paris-based startup co-founded by former Meta researchers Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, two of Llama’s key architects. Alongside several fellow Meta alums, they’re building powerful open-source models that directly compete with Meta’s flagship AI efforts.
The exits over time raise questions about Meta’s ability to retain top AI talent just as it faces a new wave of external and internal pressure. The company is delaying its largest-ever AI model, Behemoth, after internal concerns about its performance and leadership, The Wall Street Journal reported. Llama 4, Meta’s latest release, received a lukewarm reception from developers, many of whom now look to faster-moving open-source rivals like DeepSeek and Qwen for cutting-edge capabilities.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Inside Meta, the research team has also seen a shake-up. Joelle Pineau, who led the company’s Fundamental AI Research group (FAIR) for eight years, announced last month that she would step down. She will be replaced by Robert Fergus, who co-founded FAIR in 2014 and then spent five years at Google’s DeepMind before rejoining Meta this month.
The leadership reshuffle follows a period of quiet attrition. Many of the researchers behind Llama’s initial success have left FAIR since publishing their landmark paper, even as Meta continues to position the model family as central to its AI strategy. With so many of its original architects gone and rivals moving faster in open-source innovation, Meta now faces the challenge of defending its early lead without the team that built it.
That’s particularly significant because the 2023 Llama paper was more than just a technical milestone. It helped legitimize open-weight large language models with underlying code and parameters that are freely available for others to use, modify, and build on, as viable alternatives to proprietary systems at the time, like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s PaLM.
Meta trained its models using only publicly available data and optimized them for efficiency, enabling researchers and developers to run state-of-the-art systems on a single GPU chip. For a moment, Meta looked like it could lead the open frontier.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Two years later, that lead has slipped, and Meta no longer sets the pace.
Despite investing billions into AI, Meta still doesn’t have a dedicated “reasoning” model, one built specifically to handle tasks that require multi-step thinking, problem-solving, or calling external tools to complete complex commands. That gap has grown more noticeable as other companies like Google and OpenAI prioritize these features in their latest models.
The average tenure of the 11 departed authors at Meta was over five years, suggesting they weren’t short-term hires but researchers deeply embedded in Meta’s AI efforts. Some left as early as January 2023; others stayed through the Llama 3 cycle, and a few left as recently as this year. Together, their exits mark the quiet unraveling of the team that helped Meta stake its AI reputation on open models.
A Meta spokesperson pointed to an X post about Llama research paper authors who have left.
The list below, based on information from the researchers’ LinkedIn profiles, shows where each of them ended up.
Naman Goyal
Current role: Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab
Left Meta: February 2025
Time at Meta: 6 years, 7 months
Baptiste Rozière
Current role: AI Scientist at Mistral
Left Meta: August 2024
Time at Meta: 5 years, 1 month
Aurélien Rodriguez
Current role: Director, Foundation Model Training at Cohere
Left Meta: July 2024
Time at Meta: 2 years, 7 months
Eric Hambro
Current role: Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic
Left Meta: November 2023
Time at Meta: 3 years, 3 months
Timothée Lacroix
Benoit Tessier/REUTERS
Current role: Co-founder and CTO at Mistral
Left Meta: June 2023
Time at Meta: 8 years, 5 months
Marie-Anne Lachaux
Current role: Founding Member and AI Research Engineer at Mistral
Left Meta: June 2023
Time at Meta: 5 years
Thibaut Lavril
Current role: AI Research Engineer at Mistral
Left Meta: June 2023
Time at Meta: 4 years, 5 months
Armand Joulin
Current role: Distinguished Scientist at Google DeepMind
Left Meta: May 2023
Time at Meta: 8 years, 8 months
Gautier Izacard
Current role: Technical Staff at Microsoft AI
Left Meta: March 2023
Time at Meta: 3 years, 2 months
Edouard Grave
Current role: Research Scientist at Kyutai
Left Meta: February 2023
Time at Meta: 7 years, 2 months
Guillaume Lample
Khanh Renaud/ABACAPRESS.COM
Current role: Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Mistral
Left Meta: Early 2023
Time at Meta: 7 years
Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at pranavdixit@protonmail.com or Signal at 1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
