Skip to main content

Meta’s new ‘Llamacon’ event is all about open-source AI

A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.
SOPA Images / Getty Images

Meta announced on Tuesday that it is launching a new developers conference in April, dubbed “Llamacon,” that will focus on “open source AI developments.”

Recommended Videos

The event is scheduled to take place April 29, 2025 and comes on the heels of “the unprecedented growth and momentum of our open-source Llama collection of models and tools,” in an announcement post. The company has not shared any additional details, such as where the conference will take place or how much ticket prices will run, but the company promises to share more details “in the coming weeks.”

Meta also revealed that its Meta Connect event, geared towards virtual and mixed reality developers and content creators, is returning in the fall with “the latest and greatest in Meta Horizon updates.” The conference will September 17-18, 2025, and promises to “peel back the curtain on tomorrow’s tech.”

As with the rest of the American AI industry, Meta plans to spend freely on the technology in 2025. At the end of January, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will invest between $60 billion and $65 billion on AI infrastructure this year, including a new data center that will consume a full gigawatt of energy — the equivalent energy output of two nuclear power stations.

“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than one billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts.”

Andrew Tarantola
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Andrew Tarantola is a journalist with more than a decade reporting on emerging technologies ranging from robotics and machine…
Amazon’s AI shopper makes sure you don’t leave without spending
Amazon Buy for Me feature.

The future of online shopping on Amazon is going to be heavily dependent on AI. Early in 2025, the company pushed its Rufus AI agent to spill product information and help users find the right items. A few weeks later, another AI tool called Interests made its way to the shopping site. 

The new Alexa+ AI assistant is also capable of placing orders semi-autonomously, handling everything from groceries to booking appointments. Now, the company has started to test yet another AI agent that will buy products from other websites if they’re not available on Amazon — without ever leaving the app. 

Read more
Microsoft’s Bing adds a Copolit Search mode to rival Google AI Search
Copilot Search for Bing Search engine.

Barely a few weeks ago, Google introduced a new AI Search mode. The idea is to provide answers as a wall of text, just the way an AI chatbot answers your queries, instead of the usual Search Results with blue links to different sources.

Microsoft is now in the race, too. The company has quietly rolled out a new Copilot Search option for its Bing search engine. The feature was first spotted by Windows Latest, but Digital Trends can confirm that it is now accessible across all platforms. 

Read more
Meta AI glasses leak tips one-eyed screen, Android soul, and high ask
Phil Nickinson wearing the Apple AirPods Pro and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

Meta has tasted some unprecedented success with its Stories smart glasses, created in collaboration with Ray-Ban. The premise of a wearable device with onboard cameras, ready to take social media videos, coupled with an onboard AI assistant, has proved hot enough that Meta has even made high-fashion variants for the upscale market. 

What they have sorely missed so far, is an interactive screen. The next avenue for Meta is apparently putting a display on its fashionable smart glasses and taking their functional appeal to the next level. But that convenience will apparently come at a steep ask. According to Bloomberg, customers are in for a sticker shock worth a thousand dollars at the very least. 

Read more