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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<\/a>, which will compete with ChatGPT, as well as a developer-facing API<\/a> for accessing Llama models in the cloud. <\/p>\n Both releases aim to expand adoption of the company\u2019s open Llama AI models, but that goal may be secondary to Meta\u2019s true motive: beating OpenAI. Meta\u2019s AI ambition, in broad strokes, is fueling a thriving open AI ecosystem that sticks it to \u201cclosed\u201d AI providers like OpenAI, which gate their models behind services.<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s AI chatbot app feels almost like a preemption of OpenAI\u2019s rumored social network<\/a>. It has a social feed where users can share their AI chats, and offers personalized responses based on a user\u2019s Meta app activity.<\/p>\n As for the Llama API, it\u2019s a challenge to OpenAI\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Meta, like many AI companies, perceives OpenAI to be a top rival. Court filings in a case against Meta reveal that the company\u2019s execs previously obsessed<\/a> over beating OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4, which was once a state-of-the-art model. Undercutting proprietary AI model providers like OpenAI has long been core to Meta\u2019s AI strategy. In a July 2024 letter<\/a>, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to contrast Meta with companies like OpenAI, writing that \u201cselling access to AI models isn\u2019t [Meta\u2019s] business model.\u201d<\/p>\n Several AI researchers who spoke with TechCrunch ahead of LlamaCon were hoping Meta would release a competitive AI reasoning model like OpenAI\u2019s o3-mini<\/a>. The company didn\u2019t end up doing so. But for Meta, it\u2019s not about winning the AI race necessarily.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Qwen, as allies in the fight against closed model providers.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of the value around open source is that you can mix and match. So if another model, like DeepSeek, is better \u2014 or if Qwen is better at something \u2014 then, as developers, you have the ability to take the best parts of the intelligence from different models and produce exactly what you need,\u201d said Zuckerberg. \u201cThis is part of how I think open source basically passes in quality all the closed source [models] \u2026 [I]t feels like sort of an unstoppable force.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond stunting OpenAI\u2019s growth, Meta may also be trying to push its open models to satisfy a regulatory carveout<\/a>. The EU AI Act grants special privileges to companies that distribute \u201cfree and open source\u201d AI systems. Meta often claims its Llama models are \u201copen source,\u201d despite disagreement on whether they meet the necessary criteria<\/a>.<\/p>\n Regardless of the reason, Meta seems content to kick off AI launches that strengthen the open model ecosystem and limit OpenAI\u2019s growth \u2014 sometimes at the expense of failing to deliver cutting-edge models itself. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n