Meta’s First LlamaCon Shows the Tech Giant’s Still Playing Catch-Up

If you were like me and went into Meta’s LlamaCon keynote expecting the company to drop the reasoning model it teased earlier this month or its teacher model Behemoth, prepare to be disappointed. The company’s first AI developers conference was today, and while we didn’t get any new models, there were a couple of announcements that helped Meta catch up in what’s become an ultra-competitive, fast race to build generative AI. But there wasn’t much in the announcements to help it get ahead.

Every big tech company is racing to build a model that can handle complex tasks without requiring a ton of computing power (and thus money) to run. Meta’s approach to AI has focused on being open-source, which gives developers a peek behind the curtain at how models are built and trained. Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, dropped an updated stat, confirming that there have been 1.2 billion downloads of Llama models to date. Between that and the integrations of Meta AI in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta is certainly a major player in the space — even if it’s sometimes late to the party or does things differently.

Here’s everything Meta did release today and where that leaves the company going forward in the AI industry.

Meta AI, the app

The company is rebranding its smart glasses Meta View app into a standalone app for its AI, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed via Instagram a few hours before the keynote. 

You can download the app now.  If you can’t find it by searching for “Meta AI” like I couldn’t, try searching for “Meta View” instead.

The app is an extension of its chatbot, with voice-mode capabilities meant to let you chat with Meta AI and a social discover feed. It’s not the same as your Instagram or Facebook feeds; you can’t find and follow your friends. Instead, you’ll see posts from random users’ experience with Meta AI, including AI images they created and prompts they asked and the chatbot’s answers. 

CNBC reported the possibility of a standalone Meta AI app in February, but the choice to convert the Meta View app raises bigger questions about Meta’s AI and VR future. “Meta making a play for another compelling phone app looks like a way to try to draw more people into the ecosystem faster than making a pitch to get glasses,” my colleague and smart glasses expert Scott Stein wrote. 

Llama 4: Where’s the reasoning model?

Meta did not round out its class of Llama 4 models at LlamaCon; instead Cox just repeated information we mostly knew about Scout and Maverick. CNET reached out to Meta for the most up-to-date information on the release of Behemoth and the Llama 4 reasoning model Zuckerberg introduced earlier this month, but Meta declined to comment.

The models available now in the Llama 4 family are Scout and Maverick. Scout is a smaller model designed to run on one Nvidia H100 GPU (with a 10 million token context window), and Maverick is the next level up with more power. 

There was some confusion back when Meta released the benchmarking scores for Llama 4. The company initially said Maverick outperformed GPT-4o from OpenAI. But eagle-eyed experts saw, and the benchmarking organization confirmed, that the Maverick model submitted for testing wasn’t the same model people could actually use now; it was “optimized for conversationality.” Meta denied training the model on post-testing data, which is a big no-no because that could give the model an unfair edge in benchmarking tests and not accurately assess its performance.

Meta’s AI policy states that it does train its models on information shared on Meta Platforms and with content you share with the chatbot. The company recently ended its opt-out option for European users, so this applies to them as well. You can check out Meta’s full privacy policy for more info.

Meta’s Llama API platform

Developers who want to build using Meta AI got good news on Tuesday when Meta announced it is going to being previewing its Llama API, an upcoming developer platform for Llama application development. Devs can request early, experimental access to Llama 4 fast inference now.

“You should be able to take these custom models with you, whenever you want, no locking, ever,” said Manohar Paluri, Meta’s vice president of AI. He also called out that speed, ease of use and customization should be the hallmarks of using the Llama API. The new Llama 4 models, Scout and Maverick, will be included in the API.

Angela Fan, research scientist in generative AI at Meta, also highlighted that the API privacy policy is a bit different than the regular Meta AI policy. When you use the API, Meta will not train on the inputs (your prompts and things you upload) or on the outputs (what it spits out). This is good for developers who want to build models for enterprise, or businesses, but need to ensure the data they upload stays secure.

What’s next for Meta AI?

The announcements at LlamaCon help Meta catch up to its competitors but doesn’t put them ahead of the curve, which might spell trouble for the future. There’s still no word on when Meta will release Behemoth or the reasoning model it promised in its Llama 4 drop. 

The Meta View app is fine, but it really just helps Meta even the playing field as most of the major AI players already have mobile apps, including OpenAI, Claude and Perplexity. For Meta smart glasses users, the app’s evolution might point to how AI is going to be at the forefront of those offerings.

I left the keynote thinking that Meta is consistently late to the AI party — OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek all have reasoning models already out now. As I wrote in my review of Meta AI last year, there’s nothing wrong with being behind if the company comes out swinging. But so far, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I think the most surprising thing was the social discover feed in the Meta AI app. With all of Meta’s expertise in building social platforms, the discover/explore page could be a promising (though unlikely) replacement for people to flood that feed with AI instead of Facebook or Instagram. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on, especially as Meta updates the app and moves forward with AI.

For more, check out our review of the best AI chatbots.