Meta
US technology company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Meta AI
Profile
- Country
- United States
- Headquarters
- Menlo Park, California
- Founded
- February 2004 (Facebook launched); incorporated July 2004
- Founders
- Mark Zuckerberg with Harvard classmates (Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin and others)
- Type
- Public company listed on Nasdaq (META)
Meta (Meta Platforms) is a technology company with its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in the United States. It began in February 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg, then a Harvard student, launched 'Facebook' with Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin and others. At first, Facebook was open only to Harvard students. It was incorporated in Delaware in July that year and listed its shares on the stock market in May 2012. In October 2021 it changed the company's name from Facebook to Meta, a name taken from 'metaverse', meaning a virtual world. Today its shares trade on the US Nasdaq stock market under the ticker 'META'. As of October 2026, its founder Mark Zuckerberg is chief executive (CEO).
Meta earns almost all of its revenue from advertising. In its 'Family of Apps' segment, which brings together apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, it is paid by advertisers to show their ads to the people they want to reach. In 2023 it also launched 'Threads', a text-based social network. Its other segment, 'Reality Labs', makes virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices, software and content. The company says this segment has so far generated only limited revenue.
In AI, it has released the 'Llama' series of large language models (AI that learns from a huge amount of text and writes sentences like a person) since 2023 as open-weight models (models whose files are published so they can be downloaded and used). In 2025 it reorganised its AI work into 'Meta Superintelligence Labs', and in April 2026 it made that lab's first model, 'Muse Spark', available in the app and website of its AI assistant, 'Meta AI'. In August 2026 it released 'Muse Glimmer', an open-weight model that can run on a personal computer, and in October it released 'Muse Wonder', which Meta calls its most capable model so far. Muse Wonder cannot be downloaded; it is offered through a developer API and the coding tool 'Muse Code'. It has also introduced devices such as 'Ray-Ban Meta' smart glasses.
Sources for this profile (10) · as of Oct 22, 2026
- Meta Platforms, Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 · Meta Platforms / U.S. SEC
- Company Information, Culture, and Principles | About Meta · Meta
- When was Facebook created and who had the first account? · USA Today
- Facebook Changes Company Name to Meta · CNBC (via NBC Boston)
- Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results · Meta Platforms / U.S. SEC
- Introducing Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence · Meta
- Meta debuts the Muse Spark model in a 'ground-up overhaul' of its AI · TechCrunch
- Introducing Muse Glimmer: An Open Agentic Model That Runs on Your Device · Meta
- Muse Wonder: A Frontier Model For Personal & Professional AI Agents · Meta
- Meta's New Muse Wonder Models Challenge OpenAI, but Access Comes With Limits · TechRepublic
AIMade by AIThis profile was written by AI (Claude) from the 10 sources above (official pages, filings, news reports).How it's made
Records 27
Newest first. Open one to see it with its source.
2026 5
In the team's own measurements, 4 MLPerf Tiny models each ran in 21.5ms or less and under 90KiB of RAM on a single Cortex-M55 core of the Alif Ensemble E8 (the anomaly detection autoencoder in 5.2KiB). The team noted the
Meta claims it is the most capable US open-weights model to date. It adds safety post-training for standalone use on top of the same base model as Muse Spark 1.3, and ships with SGLang and vLLM optimizations and Helion k
MSL keeps to its closed-API route while putting agent efficiency (fewer tool calls and tokens) forward as its headline metric
The first open weights since Llama 4, released under Apache 2.0; an on-device agent at under 20GB in 4-bit
The point at which Meta's two-track strategy was settled: the frontier model closed, with only separate small models open
2025 6
The point at which the single-controller model proposed by Google's Pathways in 2022 entered the core PyTorch lineage. TorchTitan becomes an actor inside Monarch, and torchforge is built on top of Monarch
Just as Triton abstracted CUDA by one level, Helion abstracts Triton by one more. The next layer in the lineage of kernel authoring
A shift from evaluating static information retrieval to measuring agent robustness in dynamic, asynchronous environments
A turning point for the Llama line; Behemoth's release postponed
The mismatch between versions submitted to leaderboards and the publicly released ones became a public issue
A turning point for trust in the Llama brand
2024 8
Processes bytes directly, without a fixed vocabulary, using entropy-based dynamic patches; the first large-scale scaling of the tokenizer-free approach
An update to the Llama 3 line that shipped a single 70B instruction-tuned model, with no separate pretrained release
The point at which a PyTorch-native training framework became established as an alternative to Megatron-LM. FSDP2, torch.compile and FP8 were bundled into a single stack
The 11B and 90B were the first Llama models to support image input, released alongside 1B and 3B models aimed at on-device use
The first primary source to publish quantitative data on fault tolerance in large-scale training. Settled, for the whole industry, that checkpointing and automatic recovery are essential
Frontier-class weights were released for the first time, and the license allowed training on the model's outputs
A case showing that kernels must be rewritten for a specific generation of silicon. Quantitatively rebutted accuracy concerns about FP8 attention
The 8B delivered the previous generation's 70B-class performance, raising the bar for practical local use
2023 7
On 466 questions, humans scored 92% versus 15% for GPT-4 with plugins; shifted the focus of evaluation from hard exams to practical ability
Structured self-checking into 4 steps to reduce hallucinations
A code-specialized line trained on 500B tokens of code and code-related data on top of Llama 2; a 70B version was added on January 29, 2024
Popularized open weights, and the starting point of the debate over whether it is open source
The turning point at which large-scale training became possible with the standard framework, without DeepSpeed
The first large attempt to distribute frontier-class weights after vetting
Learns on its own, through self-supervised learning, when to call APIs and with what arguments — the route of building tool use into the weights
2021 1
A redesign of FSDP1. The precondition that made FP8 training, partial freezing and compiler optimization possible