Wikipedia

Meta AI

Meta AI
Company typeDivision
IndustryArtificial intelligence
FoundedDecember 11, 2015; 9 years ago (2015-12-11)
Founders
HeadquartersAstor Place, New York City, New York, U.S.
Key people
ProductsLlama
OwnerMeta Platforms
Websiteai.meta.com
This article is part of a series about
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People
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Notable employees
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Part of a series on
Artificial intelligence (AI)
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Glossary

Meta AI is a research division of Meta (formerly Facebook) that develops artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies.

History

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The foundation of Facebook's AI division was announced in 2013, under the name Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR).[1] FAIR has workspaces in Menlo Park, California, London, United Kingdom, and Manhattan. FAIR was first directed by New York University's Yann LeCun, a deep learning professor and Turing Award winner.[2] Working with NYU's Center for Data Science, FAIR's initial goal was to research data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.[3][self-published source?] Vladimir Vapnik, a pioneer in statistical learning, joined FAIR[4] in 2014.

FAIR opened a research center in Paris, France in 2015,[5] and subsequently launched smaller satellite research labs in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Tel Aviv, Montreal and London.[6] In 2016, FAIR partnered with Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft in creating the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.

In 2018, Jérôme Pesenti, former CTO of IBM's big data group, assumed the role of president of FAIR, while LeCun stepped down to serve as chief AI scientist.[7] FAIR had approximately 200 staff in 2018.[8]

FAIR's initial work included research in learning-model enabled memory networks, self-supervised learning and generative adversarial networks, document classification and translation, as well as computer vision.[3] FAIR released Torch deep-learning modules as well as PyTorch in 2017, an open-source machine learning framework,[3] which was subsequently used in several deep learning technologies, such as Tesla's autopilot [9] and Uber's Pyro.[10] That same year, a pair of chatbots were falsely rumored[11] to be discontinued for developing a language that was unintelligible to humans.[12] FAIR clarified that the research had been shut down because they had accomplished their initial goal to understand how languages are generated by their models, rather than out of fear.[11]

FAIR was renamed Meta AI following the rebranding that changed Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc.[13]

Virtual assistant

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See also: Virtual assistant

Meta AI is also the name of the virtual assistant developed by the team, now integrated as a chatbot into Meta's social networking products.[14] It is also available as a subscription-based stand-alone app.[15][16]

The virtual assistant was pre-installed on the second generation of Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, and is able to receive contextual information from the glasses' cameras after an update.[17] It is also available on Quest 2 and newer HMDs.[18]

Since May 2024, the chatbot has summarized news from various outlets without linking directly to original articles, including in Canada, where news links are banned on its platforms. This use of news content without compensation and attribution has raised ethical and legal concerns, especially as Meta continues to reduce news visibility on its platforms.[19]

Current research

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Natural language processing and chatbot

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See also: Natural language processing

Meta AI works on machines' ability to understand and generate natural language. The team also seeks to allow their chatbots to communicatemultilingually.[20] This involves the generalization of natural language processing (NLP) technology to other languages, and the team actively works on unsupervised machine translation.[21][22]

Galactica

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Galactica is a large language model (LLM) designed for generating scientific text released on 15 November 2022. It withdrew from service two days later, due to generating racist and inaccurate contents.[23][24]

Llama

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Main article: Llama (language model)

LLaMA is a LLM released in February 2023, supporting 7B to 65B parameters.[25] Two of the three Llama 4 models, Scout and Maverick was released on April 5, 2025, with the biggest model, Behemoth, still in training.[26]

Hardware

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Meta uses CPUs and in-house custom chips until 2022, when they switched to Nvidia GPUs. Several data centers were redesigned to accommodate the larger network bandwidth and cooling requirements.[27]

MTIA v1

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Meta developed the training and inference accelerator, MTIA v1, specifically for their content recommendation workloads. It was fabricated on TSMC's 7 nm process technology and operates at a frequency of 800 MHz. The accelerator provides 51.2 TFLOPS at FP16 precision, with a thermal design power (TDP) of 25 W.[28]

Mathematical theorem proving

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In 2022, Meta created a method for proving mathematical theorems called HyperTree Proof Search (HTPS), which successfully generated proofs of 10 International Mathematical Olympiad problems in Lean.[29]

References

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  1. ^ "NYU "Deep Learning" Professor LeCun Will Head Facebook's New Artificial Intelligence Lab". TechCrunch. 9 December 2013. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  2. ^ "Yann LeCun - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". amturing.acm.org. Archived from the original on 2023-03-27. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  3. ^ a b c "FAIR turns five: What we've accomplished and where we're headed". Engineering at Meta. 2018-12-05. Archived from the original on 2022-05-11. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  4. ^ "Facebook's AI team hires Vladimir Vapnik, father of the popular support vector machine algorithm". VentureBeat. 2014-11-25. Archived from the original on 2014-11-27. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  5. ^ Dillet, Romain (June 2, 2015). "Facebook Opens New AI Research Center in Paris". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 7, 2022.
  6. ^ "Facebook Opens New AI Research Center In Paris". TechCrunch. 2 June 2015. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  7. ^ Dave, Greshgorn (January 23, 2018). "The head of Facebook's AI research is stepping into a new role as it shakes up management". Quartz. Archived from the original on May 8, 2022. Retrieved May 7, 2022.
  8. ^ Shead, Sam. "Facebook Plans To Double Size Of AI Research Unit By 2020". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2022-05-08. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  9. ^ Karpathy, Andrej (6 November 2019). "PyTorch at Tesla - Andrej Karpathy, Tesla". YouTube. Archived from the original on 2023-03-24. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  10. ^ "Pyro". pyro.ai. Archived from the original on 2022-05-06. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  11. ^ a b "Facebook researchers shut down AI bots that started speaking in a language unintelligible to humans". Tech2. 2017-07-31. Archived from the original on 2022-05-08. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  12. ^ McKay, Tom (2017-08-01). "No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2025-05-27. When Facebook directed two of these semi-intelligent bots to talk to each other, FastCo reported, the programmers realized they had made an error by not incentivizing the chatbots to communicate according to human-comprehensible rules of the English language. In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand—but while it might look creepy, that's all it was.
  13. ^ Murphy Kelly, Samantha (October 29, 2021). "Facebook changes its company name to Meta". CNN Business. Archived from the original on May 7, 2022. Retrieved May 7, 2022.
  14. ^ Kawale, Ajinkya (20 February 2025). "India among largest Meta AI adopters, backs open-source innovation". Business Standard. Archived from the original on 2025-02-20. Retrieved 2025-02-22.
  15. ^ "Meta to Launch Standalone AI App with Premium Features Amid Growing Competition". Mint. 2024-02-27. Retrieved 2025-02-28.
  16. ^ "Meta AI Expansion: Standalone App and Subscription Model in the Works". Mint. 2024-02-27. Retrieved 2025-02-28.
  17. ^ "Smart(er) Glasses: Introducing New Ray-Ban | Meta Styles + Expanding Access to Meta AI with Vision". Meta Quest Blog. 2024-04-23. Archived from the original on 2024-07-27.
  18. ^ Meta Quest Blog (July 23, 2024). "Introducing Meta AI on Meta Quest—Your Smart MR Assistant". Meta Blog.
  19. ^ "Meta walked away from news. Now the company's using it for AI content". The Washington Post. 21 May 2024. Archived from the original on 21 May 2024. Retrieved 22 May 2024.
  20. ^ "Meta AI Research Topic - Natural Language Processing". ai.facebook.com. Archived from the original on 2022-05-08. Retrieved 2022-05-08.
  21. ^ Lample, Guillaume; Ott, Myle; Conneau, Alexis; Denoyer, Ludovic; Ranzato, Marc'Aurelio (2018-08-13). "Phrase-Based & Neural Unsupervised Machine Translation". arXiv:1804.07755 [cs.CL].
  22. ^ Conneau, Alexis; Lample, Guillaume; Rinott, Ruty; Williams, Adina; Bowman, Samuel R.; Schwenk, Holger; Stoyanov, Veselin (2018-09-13). "XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations". arXiv:1809.05053 [cs.CL].
  23. ^ "Why Meta's latest large language model survived only three days online". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2025-07-18.
  24. ^ Edwards, Benj (18 November 2022). "New Meta AI demo writes racist and inaccurate scientific literature, gets pulled". Ars Technica. Retrieved 30 December 2022.
  25. ^ Leswing, Kif (2023-02-24). "Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta's new large language model as A.I. race heats up". CNBC. Retrieved 2025-04-14.
  26. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (2025-04-05). "Meta releases Llama 4, a new crop of flagship AI models". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2025-04-14.
  27. ^ Insight: Inside Meta's scramble to catch up on AI By Katie Paul, Krystal Hu, Stephen Nellis and Anna Tong April 25, 20233:06 PM PDT
  28. ^ Peters, Jay (2023-05-19). "Meta is working on a new chip for AI". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2023-06-07. Retrieved 2023-06-07.
  29. ^ "Teaching AI advanced mathematical reasoning". ai.meta.com. November 3, 2022.
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