LlamaCon: Meta AI gets into the Llama API platform business

**Meta** celebrated progress in the **Llama** ecosystem at LlamaCon, launching an AI Developer platform with finetuning and fast inference powered by **Cerebras** and **Groq** hardware, though it remains waitlisted. Meanwhile, **Alibaba** released the **Qwen3** family of large language models, including **two MoE models** and **six dense models** ranging from **0.6B to 235B parameters**, with the flagship **Qwen3-235B-A22B** achieving competitive benchmark results and supporting **119 languages and dialects**. The Qwen3 models are optimized for coding and agentic capabilities, are Apache 2.0 licensed, and have broad deployment support including local usage with tools like **vLLM**, **Ollama**, and **llama.cpp**. Community feedback highlights Qwen3's scalable performance and superiority over models like OpenAI's **o3-mini**.