On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer conference, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. The company announced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API for accessing Llama models in the cloud.
Both releases aim to expand adoption of the company’s open Llama AI models, but that goal may be secondary to Meta’s true motive: beating OpenAI. Meta’s AI ambition, in broad strokes, is fueling a thriving open AI ecosystem that sticks it to “closed” AI providers like OpenAI, which gate their models behind services.
Meta’s AI chatbot app feels almost like a preemption of OpenAI’s rumored social network. It has a social feed where users can share their AI chats, and offers personalized responses based on a user’s Meta app activity.
As for the Llama API, it’s a challenge to OpenAI’s API business. The Llama API is designed to make it simpler for developers to build apps that connect to Llama models in the cloud, using just a single line of code. It eliminates the need to rely on third-party cloud providers to run Llama models, and allows Meta to offer a fuller array of tools for AI developers.
Meta, like many AI companies, perceives OpenAI to be a top rival. Court filings in a case against Meta reveal that the company’s execs previously obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4, which was once a state-of-the-art model. Undercutting proprietary AI model providers like OpenAI has long been core to Meta’s AI strategy. In a July 2024 letter, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to contrast Meta with companies like OpenAI, writing that “selling access to AI models isn’t [Meta’s] business model.”
Several AI researchers who spoke with TechCrunch ahead of LlamaCon were hoping Meta would release a competitive AI reasoning model like OpenAI’s o3-mini. The company didn’t end up doing so. But for Meta, it’s not about winning the AI race necessarily.
During an onstage conversation with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi during LlamaCon, Zuckerberg said he sees any AI lab that makes its models openly available, including DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, as allies in the fight against closed model providers.
“Part of the value around open source is that you can mix and match. So if another model, like DeepSeek, is better — or if Qwen is better at something — then, as developers, you have the ability to take the best parts of the intelligence from different models and produce exactly what you need,” said Zuckerberg. “This is part of how I think open source basically passes in quality all the closed source [models] … [I]t feels like sort of an unstoppable force.”
Beyond stunting OpenAI’s growth, Meta may also be trying to push its open models to satisfy a regulatory carveout. The EU AI Act grants special privileges to companies that distribute “free and open source” AI systems. Meta often claims its Llama models are “open source,” despite disagreement on whether they meet the necessary criteria.
Regardless of the reason, Meta seems content to kick off AI launches that strengthen the open model ecosystem and limit OpenAI’s growth — sometimes at the expense of failing to deliver cutting-edge models itself.