
Meta on Tuesday announced that it’ll host its first-ever dev convention devoted to generative AI.
Referred to as LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama household of generative AI fashions, the convention is scheduled to happen on April 29. Meta mentioned that, there, it’ll share “the most recent on [its] open supply AI developments to assist builders […] construct superb apps and merchandise.”
Extra particulars shall be made out there quickly, mentioned Meta. The corporate’s annual developer convention, Meta Join, shall be held later within the yr, in September — its typical window.
Meta, which a number of years in the past embraced an “open” strategy to creating AI applied sciences in a bid to foster an ecosystem of apps and platforms, was reportedly caught flat-footed by the rise of Chinese language AI firm DeepSeek, which managed to launch “open” AI to rival Meta’s personal.
Reportedly, Meta believes that certainly one of DeepSeek’s newer fashions may outperform the following model of Llama, which is ready to be launched within the coming weeks. Meta is claimed to have scrambled battle rooms to decipher how DeepSeek lowered the price of working and deploying fashions to use these learnings to Llama growth.
Meta just lately mentioned that it might spend as much as $80 billion on tasks associated to AI this yr, together with AI hires and the development of recent AI knowledge facilities.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously announced that the corporate plans to launch a number of Llama fashions over the following few months, together with “reasoning” fashions alongside the traces of OpenAI’s o3-mini and fashions with natively multimodal capabilities.
Meta, which claims that its Llama fashions have racked up lots of of hundreds of thousands of downloads, is within the midst of a lawsuit that accuses the corporate of coaching its fashions on copyrighted ebook supplies with out permission. In one other problem to Meta’s Llama ambitions, several EU countries have compelled the corporate to postpone — and in some circumstances cancel altogether — its mannequin launch plans over knowledge privateness considerations.