April 4 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms META.O plans to release the latest version of its large language model later this month, after delaying it at least twice, the Information reported on Friday, as the Facebook owner scrambles to lead in the AI race.

Meta, however, could push back the release of Llama 4 again, the report said, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Big technology firms have been investing aggressively in AI infrastructure following the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which altered the tech landscape and drove investment into machine learning.

The report said one of the reasons for the delay is during development, Llama 4 did not meet Meta's expectations on technical benchmarks, particularly in reasoning and math tasks.

The company was also concerned that Llama 4 was less capable than OpenAI's models in conducting humanlike voice conversations, the report added.

Meta plans to spend as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure, amid investor pressure on big tech firms to show returns on their investments.

Additionally, the rise of the popular, lower-cost model from Chinese tech firm DeepSeek challenges the belief that developing the best AI model requires billions of dollars.

The report said Llama 4 is expected to borrow certain technical aspects from DeepSeek, with at least one version slated to employ a machine-learning technique called mixture of experts method, which trains separate parts of models for specific tasks, making them experts in those areas.

Meta has also considered releasing Llama 4 through Meta AI first and then as open-source software later, the report said.

Last year, Meta released its mostly free Llama 3 AI model, which can converse in eight languages, write higher-quality computer code and solve more complex math problems than previous versions.

(Reporting by Priyanka.G in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)

((Priyanka.G@thomsonreuters.com;))