In mid-March, Meta said that its “open” AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads, up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024. On Tuesday at its inaugural LlamaCon developer conference, Meta revealed that figure has reached 1.2 billion downloads.
“We have thousands of developers contributing tens of thousands of derivative models being downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month,” said Meta chief product officer Chris Cox onstage during a keynote.
Meanwhile, Meta AI, Meta’s AI assistant powered by Llama models, has reached around a billion users, Cox added.
Meta’s Llama ecosystem is growing at a fast clip indeed, but the tech giant faces competition from a number of formidable players in the AI space. Just on Monday, Alibaba released Qwen3, a family of models that’s highly competitive on a number of AI benchmarks.
