Meta Platforms, Inc.
Headquarters
Menlo Park, CAFounded
2004CEO / Founder
Mark ZuckerbergEmployees
10000+Funding
PublicStock
METAProducts
2 products listedAvg. AI Score
7.7/10Website
meta.com/
Profile updated
About Meta Platforms, Inc.
Meta Platforms, Inc. was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes as Facebook, Inc. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the company rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021 to reflect its expanded focus on immersive and AI-driven technologies beyond social networking.
Meta operates four major platforms — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — serving billions of users worldwide. Its Reality Labs division develops the Quest line of virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta augmented reality glasses. Meta's AI research organization publishes large language models including the Llama series under open-source licenses and operates one of the largest AI infrastructure investments in the industry.
Meta conducted its initial public offering on NASDAQ in May 2012, originally trading as FB before adopting the ticker META in 2022. The company acquired Instagram in 2012 for approximately $1 billion, WhatsApp in 2014 for approximately $19 billion, and Oculus VR in 2014 for approximately $2 billion. Meta generates revenue primarily through digital advertising across its social platforms and employs tens of thousands of people globally.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Meta Platforms, Inc.
All products by Meta Platforms, Inc. reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
Open-weight large language models for custom deployment at any scale
Generate images from text prompts using Meta's AI models
How Our Review Panel Scores Meta Platforms, Inc.
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Meta Platforms, Inc.'s products on their own terms. They landed within 0.5 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 2 reviewed products in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Meta Platforms, Inc. competes with, and how they differ.
Closed-source frontier models (GPT series) offered via paid API, contrasting with Llama's open-weight licensing model.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Gemini models are proprietary and accessed via API/cloud, targeting enterprise customers on Google Cloud rather than open-weight self-hosting.
6 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Claude API is a closed-weight, safety-focused commercial model family sold on usage-based pricing, unlike Meta's freely downloadable Llama weights.
3 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Azure OpenAI Service resells hosted proprietary models and Designer competes directly with Imagine with Meta in AI image generation, both bundled into Microsoft's enterprise cloud ecosystem.
9 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Hosts and distributes Llama alongside many other open models, competing as a neutral model hub and MLOps platform rather than a model creator.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Stable Diffusion offers open-weight image generation models directly competing with Imagine with Meta, distributed under a separate open license and commercial API.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Meta Platforms, Inc.'s history, with sources.
- Launch
Llama 4 Scout and Maverick released
Meta released the Llama 4 herd of natively multimodal, mixture-of-experts open-weight models, with Scout and Maverick available immediately and the larger Behemoth model previewed as still in training.
ai.meta.com - Launch
Llama 3.1 405B launched
Meta released the Llama 3.1 collection, including the 405-billion-parameter model it described as the first openly available frontier-level AI model, with a 128K context window and support for eight languages.
ai.meta.com - Launch
Llama 2 released as open-source, commercial-use model
Meta and Microsoft introduced Llama 2, made freely available for research and commercial use in 7B, 13B, and 70B parameter sizes, a shift from the research-only license of the original Llama.
about.fb.com - Launch
Threads launched
Meta launched Threads, a text-based conversation app built by the Instagram team as a direct rival to Twitter, reaching 5 million sign-ups within four hours.
about.fb.com - Milestone
Company renamed from Facebook to Meta Platforms
Mark Zuckerberg announced at the Connect conference that the parent company would be renamed Meta to reflect a strategic pivot toward building the metaverse; the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp app brands were unaffected.
about.fb.com - Acquisition
Acquired Oculus VR for approximately $2 billion
Facebook announced a definitive agreement to acquire virtual-reality headset maker Oculus VR for about $2 billion, consisting of $400 million in cash and 23.1 million Facebook shares plus a $300 million earn-out.
about.fb.com - Acquisition
Acquired WhatsApp for approximately $19 billion
Facebook announced a definitive agreement to acquire mobile messaging company WhatsApp for a deal valued up to $19 billion, comprising cash, stock, and restricted stock units for founders and employees.
about.fb.com - Milestone
Facebook IPO on NASDAQ
Facebook went public on NASDAQ under ticker FB, pricing shares at $38 and raising $16 billion at a $104 billion valuation, then the largest technology IPO in U.S. history.
history.com - Acquisition
Acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion
Facebook announced an agreement to acquire photo-sharing app Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock, its first acquisition of a product and company with a large existing user base.
about.fb.com - Founded
Facebook founded by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard
Mark Zuckerberg launched "The Facebook" from his Harvard dorm room to connect Harvard students; the site grew to more than 1 million users by the end of the year.
history.com
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