Meta Platforms, Inc., headquartered in Menlo Park, California, is one of the world’s largest technology companies and the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Meta has transformed global communication and social networking. In the age of artificial intelligence, Meta has positioned itself as a key player by championing open-weight models and embedding AI into its family of apps and hardware products.
Meta’s most significant contribution to AI is the LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) family of models, first released in 2023. Unlike many of its competitors, Meta adopted an open-weight approach, making these models available to researchers and developers worldwide. This decision has been widely credited with democratizing access to powerful AI systems, fostering innovation, and challenging the dominance of closed frontier labs. Subsequent versions, including LLaMA 2 and LLaMA 3, expanded capabilities across natural language, coding, and multimodal reasoning, quickly becoming some of the most widely used open foundation models.
Beyond LLaMA, Meta has invested heavily in multimodal AI—systems that can understand and generate not just text, but also images, video, and speech. This aligns with the company’s strategic push into immersive digital experiences through the metaverse, as well as consumer-facing hardware. In partnership with EssilorLuxottica, Meta released the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which integrate AI-powered voice assistants, cameras, and multimodal capabilities directly into a wearable device. These glasses allow users to capture moments hands-free, translate speech in real time, and soon, identify objects and scenes through on-device AI—all while maintaining the look and feel of classic Ray-Bans.
Meta’s approach to AI is not without controversy. The open-weight release of LLaMA models has sparked debates about security, misuse, and competitive dynamics in the AI landscape. However, the company frames openness as a way to accelerate progress and reduce concentration of power in a small number of labs.
By 2025, Meta had established itself as a dual force: on one hand, a global social platform embedding AI into billions of daily interactions; on the other, a hardware innovator bringing AI into the physical world through devices like Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. With Mark Zuckerberg at the helm, Meta continues to shape both the infrastructure of social communication and the culture of openness in artificial intelligence.
