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 ... Read full article.