Meta Plays Catch-Up, But Is It Working?

Meta Platforms kicked off its first-ever LlamaCon, a conference for AI developers, on Tuesday, unveiling a fleet of new products. They included a standalone smartphone app for its Meta AI assistant and a preview of an application programming interface for developers to access its large language model Llama. The releases put Meta on par with its competitors, but the question remains: What took so long?

After all, Meta had been working on its standalone app for Meta AI for at least eight months—two months longer than it took to build Twitter rival Threads. And to get more businesses using Llama, creating a developer API is pretty basic. (We scooped the company’s plans for the app and its API last summer and earlier this month.) 

Rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Mistral have long had both chatbot apps for consumers and APIs for businesses. 

With these releases, Meta is trying to catch up with its competitors by playing both the consumer and developer game, while not breaking particularly new ground in either arena.