Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters on Tuesday, unveiling a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app and a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud.
The new Meta AI chatbot app will compete with ChatGPT and features a social feed where users can share their AI chats, offering personalized responses based on a user’s Meta app activity. The app’s design feels like a preemption of OpenAI’s rumored social network.
The Llama API is designed to simplify the process for developers to build apps that connect to Llama models in the cloud using just a single line of code. This eliminates the need to rely on third-party cloud providers to run Llama models and allows Meta to offer a fuller array of tools for AI developers, directly challenging OpenAI’s API business.
Meta’s AI strategy is centered around undercutting proprietary AI model providers like OpenAI. Court filings reveal that Meta’s executives previously focused on beating OpenAI’s GPT-4, a state-of-the-art model at the time. In a July 2024 letter, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg contrasted Meta with companies like OpenAI, stating that “selling access to AI models isn’t [Meta’s] business model.”
During LlamaCon, Zuckerberg discussed Meta’s vision for an open AI ecosystem, viewing any AI lab that makes its models openly available as allies in the fight against closed model providers. He cited DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen as examples, noting that open-source models allow developers to “mix and match” the best parts of different models to produce what they need.
Meta’s efforts may also be driven by regulatory considerations, as the EU AI Act grants special privileges to companies that distribute “free and open source” AI systems. Meta claims its Llama models are “open source,” despite some disagreement over whether they meet the necessary criteria.
Meta appears content to prioritize strengthening the open model ecosystem and limiting OpenAI’s growth, even if it means not delivering cutting-edge models itself. The company’s approach is to fuel a thriving open AI ecosystem that challenges “closed” AI providers.
