Meta

Meta Platforms is one of the most influential and most consequential technology companies in the world — the organization that operates the three largest social communication platforms on earth, leads the consumer virtual and augmented reality hardware market, and has emerged as one of the most important contributors to open-source artificial intelligence through its Llama family of large language models. Founded as Facebook in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders at Harvard, Meta has grown from a college social network into a global technology infrastructure company whose platforms connect over three billion people every single day — a scale of human communication with no parallel in human history. Meta's family of applications — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — collectively represent the most extensive social communication network ever built, spanning text, photo, video, short-form content, stories, direct messaging, group communication, and marketplace commerce across a user base that encompasses the majority of the connected world's adult population. Instagram, with over two billion monthly active users, is the defining platform for visual culture, creator commerce, and brand marketing in the social media era. WhatsApp, with over two billion users, is the primary communication infrastructure for personal and business messaging across most of the developing world. Meta's advertising platform — one of the most sophisticated audience targeting systems ever built — generates revenues that make Meta one of the largest digital advertising businesses on earth. Meta's investments in artificial intelligence and the metaverse represent the company's most ambitious long-term bets. The Meta AI Research team — FAIR — is one of the most respected fundamental AI research organizations in the world, publishing influential work on computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning that has advanced the entire field. The Llama family of open-weight language models, released publicly for research and commercial use, has become one of the most widely adopted foundations for fine-tuning and deployment in the open-source AI ecosystem. Meta Reality Labs, developing the Quest VR headset family and Ray-Ban smart glasses, is building the hardware and software infrastructure for the spatial computing era. For any organization operating in social media, digital advertising, AI development, or the emerging spatial computing landscape, Meta is one of the most strategically important and most closely watched technology companies in the world.