Meta’s LlamaCon is all about undercutting OpenAI
On February 10, Meta held the first ever AI developer conference in its Menlo Park headquarters, LlamaCon. The company has announced the launch of an AI chatbot for consumers, to compete with ChatGPT. They also released a developer API that allows developers to access Llama AI models on the cloud.
Both releases are aimed at increasing adoption of Llama AI’s open models. However, Meta’s real motive may be to beat OpenAI. Meta’s AI ambition, in broad strokes, is fueling a thriving open AI ecosystem that sticks it to “closed” AI providers like OpenAI, which gate their models behind services.
Meta’s AI chatbot app feels almost like a preemption of OpenAI’s rumored social network. It offers a social feed for users to share AI chats and personalized responses based upon a user’s Meta app usage. It is designed to simplify the process of building apps that connect with Llama cloud models, using only one line of code. It 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.
Meta, like many AI companies, perceives OpenAI to be a top rival. In court filings, Meta’s executives were obsessed with beating OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. This was a once-state-of-the art model. Meta’s AI strategies has always been centered around undercutting companies that provide proprietary AI models, such as OpenAI. In a July 2024 letter, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to contrast Meta with companies like OpenAI, writing that “selling access to AI models isn’t
business model.”[Meta’s]Several AI researchers who spoke with TechCrunch ahead of LlamaCon were hoping Meta would release a competitive AI reasoning model like OpenAI’s o3-mini. Meta didn’t release a competitive AI reasoning model like OpenAI’s o3-mini. But for Meta, it’s not about winning the AI race necessarily.
During an onstage conversation with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi during LlamaCon, Zuckerberg said he sees any AI lab that makes its models openly available, including DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, as allies in the fight against closed model providers.
“Part of the value around open source is that you can mix and match. If another model is better, such as DeepSeek — or Qwen — then developers can combine the best intelligence from multiple models to produce what they need, said Zuckerberg. “This is part of how I think open source basically passes in quality all the closed source
… [models]t feels like sort of an unstoppable force.”[I]Beyond stunting OpenAI’s growth, Meta may also be trying to push its open models to satisfy a regulatory carveout. The EU AI Act gives special privileges for companies that distribute AI systems “free and open-source”. Meta often claims its Llama models are “open source,” despite disagreement on whether they meet the necessary criteria.
Regardless of the reason, Meta seems content to kick off AI launches that strengthen the open model ecosystem and limit OpenAI’s growth — sometimes at the expense of failing to deliver cutting-edge models itself.
