Meta is hosting its first-ever LlamaCon AI developer conference to pitch developers on building applications with its open Llama AI models.Meta has struggled to keep up with open AI labs like DeepSeek and closed commercial competitors such as OpenAI in the rapidly evolving AI race.The launch of Llama 4 underwhelmed developers, and Meta's previous Llama 3 models still have a higher download rate than Llama 4.Meta needs to deliver superior models to regain the lead in open models and take more risks to outperform competitors like OpenAI and Google.