Meta just announced its inaugural LlamaCon, the company’s first-ever AI developer event. This dynamic convening is designed to connect innovators and implementers working in the booming artificial intelligence ecosystem. Scheduled to take place in the coming weeks, this event seeks to highlight Meta’s recent advancements in AI, particularly the introduction of Llama 4, a new generation of AI models.
Llama 4, despite being a pretty major leap for Meta, hasn’t wowed developers. While they weren’t enough to win the state-of-the-art classification, the models were impressive. The result is that they missed the boat on generative AI, falling behind leading competitors like DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Despite this, Meta has made strides in AI performance. The company utilized a version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to achieve impressive scores on LM Arena, a benchmark for language models. Importantly, Meta has released a public version of the Maverick model, democratizing access to its innovations.
At LlamaCon, attendees will have the opportunity to engage with some of the most influential thought leaders in tech through dynamic conversations. This includes an opening conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and a closing conversation with DeGette. First in line will be Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. They’ll discuss the promise of open-source AI and the most exciting ways that it’s already in use. This is a crucial conversation, particularly at this moment in time. In January, Databricks announced that Meta will be backing the data-focused AI startup.
Then, later in the day, Zuckerberg will be facilitating a fireside chat with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – don’t miss it at 4 p.m. Join us during this session as we highlight the partnership between these pioneering tech companies. Together, they will paint a picture of what the future looks like with transformative AI technology. These types of conversations are imperative as the industry moves at an unprecedented pace.
Maxwell is a senior reporter at TechCrunch focused on AI and emerging technologies. Pointing out that while the release of Llama 4 is a significant moment for Meta, the lackluster reception by the developer ecosystem highlights how competitive the AI ecosystem has become. As companies strive for dominance, the feedback from developers will play a pivotal role in shaping future advancements and iterations of AI models.