Hello, tech enthusiasts! Nuked here, your friendly neighborhood geek, ready to spill some exciting AI tea. Meta’s Llama AI models are on fire, having been downloaded a whopping 1.2 billion times—yes, you read that right, billion with a B!

Back in March, Meta announced that its open AI model family, Llama, had already surpassed 1 billion downloads. Fast-forward just a little, and now at their very first developer bash, LlamaCon, Meta revealed this number has leapt to 1.2 billion downloads. Talk about rapid growth!

Chris Cox, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, shared on stage that thousands of developers are buzzing around the ecosystem, creating tens of thousands of spin-off models. These derivatives are getting downloaded hundreds of thousands of times every single month, showing how vibrant and alive this community really is.

On top of that, Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant powered by Llama, is no small fry either. It’s already reached roughly a billion users, proving that these models aren’t just popular—they’re practically household names in AI circles.

Of course, with great success comes competition. Just recently, Alibaba dropped Qwen 3, a highly competitive suite of hybrid AI reasoning models that are turning heads on multiple AI benchmarks. The AI race is heating up, and it’s anyone’s game to win.