Meta needs to win over AI developers at its first LlamaCon

Summary

On Tuesday, Meta is hosting its first-ever LlamaCon AI developer conference at its Menlo Park headquarters, where the company will try to pitch developers on building applications with its open Llama AI models. Just a year ago, that wasn’t a hard sell. However, in recent months, Meta has struggled to keep up with both “open” AI labs like DeepSeek and closed commercial competitors such as OpenAI in the rapidly evolving AI race. LlamaCon comes at a critical moment for Meta in its quest to build a sprawling Llama ecosystem. Winning developers over may be as simple as shipping better open models. But that may be tougher to achieve than it sounds. A promising early start Meta’s launch of Llama 4 earlier this month underwhelmed developers, with a number of benchmark scores coming in below models like DeepSeek’s R1 and V3. It was a far cry from what Llama once was: a boundary-pushing model lineup. When Meta launched its Llama 3.1 405B model last summer, CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted it as a big win. In a blog post, Meta called Llama 3.1 405B the “most capable openly available foundation model,” with performance rivaling OpenAI’s best model at the time, GPT-4o. It was an impressive model, to be sure — and so were the other models in Meta’s Llama 3 family. Jeremy Nixon, who has hosted hackathons at San Francisco’s AGI House for the last several years, called the Llama 3 launches “historic moments.” Llama 3 arguably made Meta a darling among AI developers, delivering cutting-edge performance with the freedom to host the models wherever they chose. Today, Meta’s Llama 3.3 model is downloaded more often than Llama 4, said Hugging Face’s head of product and growth, Jeff Boudier, in an interview. Contrast that with the reception to Meta’s Llama 4 family, and the difference is stark. But Llama 4 was controversial from the start. Benchmarking shenanigans Meta optimized a version of one of its Llama 4 models, Llama 4 Maverick, for “conversationality,” which helped it nab a top spot on ...