Did they even fail? Llama2 was groundbreaking for open source LLMs, it defined the entire space. Llama3 was a major improvement over Llama2. Just because Llama4 was underwhelming, it's silly to say they failed.
No, he said that he was not involved. He had his own research model to develop, his startup will probably continue his work there but I wonder if he thinks its viable in the short term since he's launching a startup. I thought it was a moonshot.