Meta

Meta Platforms operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and has become one of the largest capital spenders in AI history. Its Llama models defined the open-weight era and seeded much of today's open-model ecosystem, while its FAIR lab has produced foundational research since 2013. In 2025 it reorganized frontier work under Meta Superintelligence Labs, recruiting aggressively — including Scale AI's Alexandr Wang — after a $14.3 billion investment in Scale.

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, Meta entered AI research seriously in 2013 when it hired Yann LeCun to build FAIR (Fundamental AI Research). The 2023 release of Llama — and the decision to publish its weights — catalyzed the open-model movement, with Llama derivatives becoming the substrate for thousands of fine-tuned models, startups, and inference businesses.

Meta's AI economics are unlike any pure lab's: models are free because AI improves ad targeting, content ranking, and engagement across apps used by more than three billion people. Meta AI, its consumer assistant, ships inside every major Meta product, and the company also monetizes AI through smart glasses with Ray-Ban and its broader Reality Labs hardware line.

In mid-2025, after a lukewarm Llama 4 reception, Zuckerberg reorganized frontier efforts into Meta Superintelligence Labs, taking a 49% stake in Scale AI to bring in Alexandr Wang as Chief AI Officer and offering record compensation packages to poach top researchers. The company's infrastructure ambitions match the rhetoric: multi-gigawatt datacenter campuses such as Hyperion in Louisiana, one of the world's largest GPU fleets, custom MTIA silicon, and annual capital expenditure guidance among the highest of any company on earth.