Meta

Meta operates social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, connecting people and selling advertising that helps marketers reach audiences through personalized content. Its Llama model family gives researchers, startups and enterprises a foundation for generative AI applications. Developers can download models, fine-tune them for additional tasks or access them through managed cloud services; Llama 2 on Amazon Bedrock, for example, removes the need to manage underlying infrastructure.

The company began as Facebook in 2004, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. Zuckerberg remains chairman and CEO, and the parent company adopted the Meta name in 2021. Llama originated within Meta’s FAIR research organization, where researchers explored how relatively small language models trained with curated data and appropriate scaling laws could support new applications. Subsequent community work extended instruction following, language coverage and context windows.

Meta went public in 2012. In September 2023, the company reported more than 30 million downloads of Llama-based models through Hugging Face and over 3,500 enterprise project starts across Google Cloud and AWS. Its 2026 teen safety agreement covering Facebook and Instagram includes approximately $18 billion in payments over ten years, with 30% conditional on specified actions by YouTube and TikTok.