On Tuesday, Meta is hosting LlamaCon, its first-ever AI developer event. It’ll center around the company’s Llama family of open AI models, and we’re expecting some big updates for developers. Also on the agenda: keynotes from Meta executives and fireside chats with Big Tech CEOs and Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta is hosting a small number of developers and journalists at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters. The company is also livestreaming the big keynotes and firesides for people around the world to tune in. LlamaCon will stream on the Meta for Developers Facebook Page and on the Meta Developers YouTube channel.
LlamaCon kicks off at 10:15 a.m. PT with a keynote speech delivered by Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox; the company’s vice president of AI, Manohar Paluri; and Meta generative AI research scientist Angela Fan.
At 10:45 a.m. PT, Zuckerberg will sit down for a fireside chat with Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi to chat about open source AI and AI-powered applications. What’s the connection between Meta and Databricks? In January, Databricks announced that Meta was backing the data-focused AI startup as a “strategic investor.“
Later in the day, at 4 p.m. PT, Zuckerberg will participate in another fireside chat with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The two CEOs are slated to discuss the latest trends in AI and offer advice for how developers can stay ahead in the fast-moving AI space.
Stakes are high for Meta going into LlamaCon. The company recently launched Llama 4, a new generation of AI models that was met with a muted reaction from developers. The Llama 4 models were not state-of-the-art on certain benchmarks compared to leading AI models from DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Soon after the launch, Meta had to fend off allegations that it cheated on a popular crowdsourced AI benchmark, LM Arena. The company used a version of its Llama 4 Maverick model “optimized for conversationality” to achieve a high score on LM Arena but released a different version of Maverick publicly.
With LlamaCon, Meta is hoping to get back into the good graces of developers. We’ll see if the company can achieve that.
