Meta is gearing up to host its inaugural AI developer event, LlamaCon, and excitement is running high. Centered around the company’s Llama family of open AI models, the event promises major announcements aimed at developers worldwide. Alongside fresh updates, attendees can expect keynote sessions featuring Meta executives and engaging fireside chats with top Big Tech leaders, including Meta’s own Mark Zuckerberg.
A select group of developers and journalists will gather at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters in California for the event. However, Meta is also making the experience widely accessible by livestreaming the keynotes and fireside discussions. Viewers can tune in via the Meta for Developers Facebook Page or the Meta Developers YouTube channel to catch the action live.
The event kicks off at 10:15 a.m. Pacific Time, with a keynote presentation led by Chris Cox, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Manohar Paluri, Vice President of AI, and Angela Fan, a Generative AI Research Scientist at Meta.
Shortly after, at 10:45 a.m., Mark Zuckerberg will take the stage for a fireside chat with Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. Their discussion will focus on open-source AI and the future of AI-powered applications. The collaboration between Meta and Databricks deepened earlier this year when Meta joined Databricks as a strategic advisor.
Later in the day, at 4 p.m., Zuckerberg will sit down with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to explore the latest trends shaping the AI landscape. The conversation is expected to deliver valuable insights for developers eager to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.
The stakes are particularly high for Meta as it enters LlamaCon. The launch of Llama 4, its latest AI model series, received a somewhat lukewarm response from developers. Although promising, Llama 4 models struggled to outperform top competitors like DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on critical benchmarks.
Adding to the tension, Meta recently faced backlash after being accused of manipulating results on the popular crowdsourced AI benchmark LM Arena. Reports suggest the company used a specially optimized version of its Llama 4 Maverick model to secure a high ranking but made a different version publicly available.
With LlamaCon, Meta aims to repair its relationship with the developer community and regain momentum in the competitive AI arena. Whether the company can successfully win back developer trust remains to be seen.
