Summary: According to a report, Meta contacted other large companies to help it fund Llama. These companies included Amazon and Microsoft.

AI is an expensive venture, everyone knows that. This is why the majority of the companies training models are the large multi-billion and multi-trillion-dollar corporations. Even DeepSeek, which claimed to have trained R1 on just a few million dollars, may have spent up to a billion dollars.

Meta is one of those massive companies training AI models. Its family of models falls under the Llama name, and the company just released its Llama 4 models. We know that it has the capital to fund these models, but it seems that Meta wanted a little help.

Meta asked other companies to help fund Llama

The company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and other big brands is no stranger to shelling out billions of dollars for its ventures. AI is no different, as its Llama models have had billions of dollars poured into them.

Meta seems to have been in need of some assistance because it reached out to major companies like Microsoft and Amazon to help fund Llama. That’s rather odd, as Meta is no small startup. It’s one of the most valuable in the world.

In any case, according to four people close to the matter (via The Information), Meta offered these companies incentives like allowing them to “influence Llama’s feature development.” We don’t know what Meta meant by that, but it would sound pretty tempting.

Be that as it may, it seemed that many of the companies weren’t sold on it. In the case of Microsoft and Amazon, these two companies are paying to train their own models. So, paying to train their competition doesn’t seem too tempting.

Meta appears to be doing just fine without the help. Its new models are all set to take on the best that Google and OpenAI have to offer.