Meta Platforms (META) has been on an explosive rally over the past two years as the stock has returned 178% over that time period. META stock has since declined over 20% from its 52-week high of $740.91, but many think it’s a temporary pullback. 

The decline from its peak is mostly due to recent trade war worries and Meta Platform’s massive artificial intelligence (AI) capex. Some investors aren’t comfortable with how much Meta is investing in AI, especially as Wall Street has soured on AI and cloud investments in recent months. But Meta can still surprise investors on April 29, and if you like the company, it’s a good idea to mark your calendars for the event.

Meta Platforms’ LlamaCon Event

Meta Platforms is scheduled to host its first-ever AI-focused developer conference called LlamaCon. The company has been hyping this event up as a response to the “unprecedented growth and momentum” of its Llama models. Llama was downloaded over 650 million times last year and has over 1 billion downloads. Meta AI also reached about 700 million monthly users by year-end.

This event is quite a big deal as it will show how the company is doing compared to its competitors in the AI space. Meta has been more of a laggard in recent months as OpenAI, Claude, Google, DeepSeek, and even many other Chinese competitors have all threatened Llama’s standing.

Llama does have a reasoning model that is cheap and scores better in certain metrics, but it has struggled to generate buzz. DeepSeek R1 seems to have dominated the conversation as a “premier” open-source AI model, with many experts focusing on its alleged low development costs.

LlamaCon could change that.

Meta hasn’t released a detailed agenda yet, but there's a good chance that Llama 4 will be unveiled at this event. Meta has been working on catching up with other AI companies, so some are speculating Llama 4 will come with “agentic and multimodal” capabilities.

How This Could Impact META Stock

Earlier, Nvidia’s (NVDA) GTC event failed to impress investors. This was a key event that bulls were betting on to restart NVDA’s momentum, but the underwhelming event instead became a drag on the stock.

Meta could knock it out of the park if it unveils Llama 4 with features that blow competitors like OpenAI’s GPT-4 or DeepSeek’s models out of the water. Meta could also announce some big-name partnerships.

Meta’s Llama AI models are open source and haven’t generated much buzz since DeepSeek has done a much better job at a lower cost so far. Meta Platforms has to beat DeepSeek R1. 

I think the event’s impact on META stock will be positive, but it is unlikely to last long if the broader market keeps souring on AI. The current price leaves a lot of room for downside.

However, the mean price target of $744.5 implies 27% upside.