Meta’s inaugural LlamaCon began Tuesday at the Menlo Park headquarters, drawing a select group of developers and journalists eager for insight into the latest AI innovations. The event, built around the company’s Llama family of artificial intelligence models, was also livestreamed globally through Meta AI‘s developer channels, expanding access to viewers everywhere.
Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, Vice President of AI Manohar Paluri, and Generative AI Research Scientist Angela Fan led off the event with an opening keynote at 10:15 a.m. Pacific. Their presentation highlighted advancements and updates coming to Meta’s suite of AI tools.
Spotlight on Open Source AI and Collaboration
At 10:45 a.m., Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks, to discuss open source AI initiatives and how developers can harness AI’s growing capabilities. The two leaders explored Meta and Databricks’s deepening relationship, marked earlier this year by Meta’s strategic advisor partnership with the data AI platform.
As the afternoon session approached, Zuckerberg was joined by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella for a fireside chat at 4 p.m. Their conversation focused on rapid changes in artificial intelligence and practical advice for those developing future technologies.
This first LlamaCon arrives as Meta seeks to regain favor with the developer community following a lukewarm response to the recent Llama 4 model launch. Developers compared the newest Llama release to offerings from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, finding Llama 4 trailing behind on some technical benchmarks.
Controversy soon followed, with Meta addressing criticisms about its approach to the LM Arena AI benchmarking process. The company clarified that a specially optimized conversational version of Llama 4 Maverick achieved high scores, while the publicly released variant differed in capability.
By bringing together industry visionaries and opening a transparent dialogue at LlamaCon, Meta hopes to reestablish trust and generate fresh momentum among developers. The event’s success could signal a pivotal moment for the company’s AI leadership moving forward.
