Meta AI

Meta AI is the artificial intelligence division of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), encompassing the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab, the Llama open-source model family, and consumer AI products integrated across Meta's platforms. With nearly 600 million monthly active users, Meta AI is on track to be the world's most-used AI assistant.

FAIR (Founded 2013): Facebook AI Research (FAIR) was founded in 2013 under the leadership of Yann LeCun, a Turing Award laureate and pioneer of convolutional neural networks. Over its first decade, FAIR produced foundational contributions in self-supervised learning, generative adversarial networks, computer vision, and NLP. FAIR released PyTorch in 2017, which became the dominant deep learning framework used in research and production (Tesla Autopilot, Uber's Pyro, and thousands of other projects).

In November 2025, Yann LeCun announced his departure from Meta after 12 years to launch a new AI startup focused on world models, raising ~$586M at a ~$3B valuation. His exit raised questions about Meta's AI research direction.

Llama Model Family:

• LLaMA (Feb 2023): First release - 7B to 65B parameter open-weight models that catalyzed the open-source AI movement
• Llama 2 (Jul 2023): 7B–70B models with commercial licensing, fine-tuned chat variants
• Llama 3 (Apr 2024): 8B and 70B models, later Llama 3.1 405B - the largest open-weight model at the time
• Llama 4 (Spring 2025): Introduced mixture-of-experts architecture with Scout (lightweight, fast) and Maverick (large, high-performance) variants. Native multimodal support for text and image input, improved context handling and reasoning
• Over 650 million downloads of Llama and derivatives, making it the most adopted open-weight model family

Infrastructure: By early 2026, Meta's GPU fleet has grown to over 1.5 million units, heavily featuring Nvidia's Blackwell B200 and GB200 chips. AI capital expenditure headed toward $70–72 billion in 2025 with even larger outlays planned for 2026.

Products:

• Meta AI Assistant: Integrated across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook - approaching 600M monthly users
• PyTorch: Open-source ML framework maintained by Meta, the standard for AI research
• Segment Anything Model (SAM): State-of-the-art image segmentation
• No Language Left Behind (NLLB): Translation model supporting 200+ languages
• Meta Ray-Ban AI Glasses: Smart glasses with integrated AI assistant

Leadership: Mark Zuckerberg (CEO, Meta Platforms), Ahmad Al-Dahle (VP of Generative AI), Joelle Pineau (VP of AI Research, FAIR). Yann LeCun (departed end of 2025).