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In a brief message Tuesday morning on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company\u2019s \u201copen\u201d AI model family, Llama, hit 1 billion downloads<\/a>. That\u2019s up from 650 million downloads as of early December 2024 \u2014 a 153% increase over a roughly-three-month period. <\/p>\n Llama, which powers Meta\u2019s AI assistant, Meta AI, across the tech giant\u2019s various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is a part of Meta\u2019s bid to foster a wide-ranging AI product ecosystem. The company makes the models and tools required to fine-tune and customize them available for free under a proprietary license. <\/p>\n Some developers and companies have taken issue with the Llama license terms, which are somewhat restrictive. Yet Llama has achieved widespread success in spite of this. Companies including Spotify use Llama models in production today. <\/p>\n That\u2019s not to suggest that Meta hasn\u2019t faced setbacks. Llama is at the center of an AI copyright lawsuit that accuses Meta of training a number of Llama models on copyrighted ebooks without authorization. In another challenge to Meta\u2019s Llama ambitions,\u00a0several EU countries<\/a>\u00a0have forced the company to postpone \u2014 and in some cases cancel altogether \u2014 its model launch plans over data privacy concerns. And Llama\u2019s performance has been leapfrogged by models like Chinese AI lab DeepSeek\u2019s R1.<\/p>\n Meta is said to have scrambled to set up war rooms to decipher how DeepSeek lowered the cost of running and deploying models, so that it could apply those learnings to Llama\u2019s own development. And Meta recently said that it would\u00a0spend as much as $80 billion<\/a>\u00a0on projects related to AI this year, including AI hires and the construction of new AI data centers.<\/p>\n Meta plans to launch<\/a> several Llama models over the next few months, including \u201creasoning\u201d models along the lines of OpenAI\u2019s\u00a0o3-mini<\/a>\u00a0and models with natively multimodal capabilities. Zuckerberg has also hinted at \u201cagentic\u201d capabilities, suggesting that future Llama models will be able to take certain actions autonomously.<\/p>\n Some of these may be announced at LlamaCon, Meta\u2019s first generative AI developer conference, which is scheduled to take place on April 29.<\/p>\n \u201cI think this very well could be the year when Llama and open source become the most advanced and widely used AI models,\u201d Zuckerberg said during Meta\u2019s Q4 2024 earnings call in January. \u201c[O]ur goal for [Llama this year] is to lead.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n