Meta Announces First-Ever LlamaCon: An AI-Focused Event for Developers, to Be Held in April

Meta announced its first-ever LlamaCon event on Tuesday, designed for developers. The conference will explore the company’s open-source AI models, tools, and future innovations. LlamaCon is set for April 29, but Meta has yet to share more details. Meanwhile, the company’s annual Meta Connect event will take place in the second half of the year, focusing on mixed reality headsets, AI glasses, and the metaverse.

Meta to Host Inaugural LlamaCon in April

Meta, based in Menlo Park, announced its first AI-focused developer conference, LlamaCon. The name combines “Llama” (Large Language Model Meta AI) and “conference.” The event will highlight future Llama models, AI agents, and tools for developers to create apps and products.

So far, Meta has only confirmed the date, but the event will likely be a hybrid experience, available both in-person and online. More details on registration, announcements, and sessions should be released in the coming weeks.

In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the company is developing Llama 4 AI models. These models will be natively multimodal and feature agentic capabilities to unlock new use cases. He also emphasized Meta’s focus on personalization with its AI chatbot.

A TechCrunch report states that Meta plans to launch multiple LLMs in the coming months, including reasoning models designed to compete with top rivals. The company is set to invest around $80 billion in AI projects this year, covering talent acquisition and the expansion of AI-focused data centers.

Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, will take place on September 17-18. The event will focus on virtual and mixed reality developers, the metaverse, AI glasses, and content creators.

An incredible year for Llama

Llama, an open large language model, grew rapidly this year. Innovation and an open update strategy fueled that growth. Meta kicked off the year with Llama 3, the next generation of our top-tier model. In July, it launched Llama 3.1, which introduced 405B—the first frontier-level open AI model.

Then, at Connect 2024, Meta kept up the momentum with Llama 3.2. That update brought to first multimodal models and compact, text-only versions built for edge and mobile devices. Finally, ended the year with Llama 3.3 70B. This new text-only model delivers performance similar to 3.1 405B, but at a much lower serving cost.

Meta Founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared some big numbers. Llama has become the most adopted model, with over 650 million downloads of Llama and its variants. That’s double what we saw just three months ago. Since February 2023, Llama models have averaged one million downloads per day.