Meta announced on Tuesday that it will host the first-ever development conference dedicated to generative artificial intelligence. The conference, named LlamaCon after Meta’s Llama series of generative AI models, is scheduled to take place on April 29. Meta says it will share "the latest advances in [its] open source AI development to help developers [...] build amazing applications and products" at the conference.
Meta said more details will be announced soon. The company's annual developer conference, MetaConnect, will be held later this year, in September, which is also its typical window.
Meta has reportedly been caught off guard by the rise of Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, which has released "open" artificial intelligence comparable to Meta.
Meta reportedly believes that one of DeepSeek's newer models may surpass Llama's next version, which is due to be released in the coming weeks. It is said that Meta is already racing in the war room to decipher how DeepSeek can reduce the cost of running and deploying models, and will apply these experiences to the development of Llama.
Meta recently said it would spend as much as $80 billion this year on AI-related projects, including AI hiring and building new AI data centers.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously announced that the company plans to launch several Llama models in the coming months, including an "inference" model similar to OpenAI's o3-mini, as well as a model with native multi-modal capabilities.
Meta claims that its Llama model has received hundreds of millions of downloads, but the company is currently in the midst of a lawsuit that accuses the company of training its model on copyrighted book material without permission. In another challenge to Meta's Llama ambitions, several EU countries have forced the company to delay - and in some cases cancel entirely - its model release plans over data privacy concerns.