On Tuesday, Meta held its first-ever AI developer convention, LlamaCon, at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. The corporate introduced the launch of a consumer-facing Meta AI chatbot app, which can compete with ChatGPT, in addition to a developer-facing API for accessing Llama fashions within the cloud.

Each releases purpose to increase adoption of the corporate’s open Llama AI fashions, however that aim could also 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 suppliers like OpenAI, which gate their fashions behind companies.

Meta’s AI chatbot app feels virtually like a preemption of OpenAI’s rumored social network. It has a social feed the place customers can share their AI chats, and provides personalised responses primarily based on a consumer’s Meta app exercise.

As for the Llama API, it’s a problem to OpenAI’s API enterprise. The Llama API is designed to make it easier for builders to construct apps that hook up with Llama fashions within the cloud, utilizing only a single line of code. It eliminates the necessity to depend on third-party cloud suppliers to run Llama fashions, and permits Meta to supply a fuller array of instruments for AI builders.

Meta, like many AI firms, perceives OpenAI to be a high rival. Court docket filings in a case towards Meta reveal that the corporate’s execs previously obsessed over beating OpenAI’s GPT-4, which was as soon as a state-of-the-art mannequin. Undercutting proprietary AI mannequin suppliers like OpenAI has lengthy been core to Meta’s AI technique. In a July 2024 letter, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sought to distinction Meta with firms like OpenAI, writing that “promoting entry to AI fashions isn’t [Meta’s] enterprise mannequin.”

A number of AI researchers who spoke with TechCrunch forward of LlamaCon have been hoping Meta would release a competitive AI reasoning model like OpenAI’s o3-mini. The corporate didn’t find yourself doing so. However for Meta, it’s not about profitable the AI race essentially.

Throughout an onstage dialog with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi throughout LlamaCon, Zuckerberg mentioned he sees any AI lab that makes its fashions brazenly accessible, together with DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, as allies within the combat towards closed mannequin suppliers.

“A part of the worth round open supply is that you would be able to combine and match. So if one other mannequin, like DeepSeek, is healthier — or if Qwen is healthier at one thing — then, as builders, you could have the power to take the very best components of the intelligence from totally different fashions and produce precisely what you want,” mentioned Zuckerberg. “That is a part of how I believe open supply principally passes in high quality all of the closed supply [models] … [I]t seems like type of an unstoppable power.”

Past stunting OpenAI’s development, Meta might also be making an attempt to push its open fashions to satisfy a regulatory carveout. The EU AI Act grants particular privileges to firms that distribute “free and open supply” AI techniques. Meta typically claims its Llama fashions are “open supply,” despite disagreement on whether they meet the necessary criteria.

Whatever the motive, Meta appears content material to kick off AI launches that strengthen the open mannequin ecosystem and restrict OpenAI’s development — generally on the expense of failing to ship cutting-edge fashions itself.