What Is Meta?

Meta traces its origins to a Harvard University dormitory in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg launched the social media site now known as Facebook. The platform would help reshape the internet, spurring the growth of user-generated content that defined the early to mid-2000s. But Zuckerberg’s ambitions stretched well beyond the online realm, prompting him to establish a team dedicated to studying artificial intelligence.

Now operating under the Meta name, Zuckerberg’s business has built on Facebook’s original research to become one of the most powerful players in the AI industry, wielding a fair share of political influence in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at what exactly Meta does, how it outgrew its Facebook branding and where it’s headed in the age of massive AI spending. 

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What Is Meta? 

Meta is a social media and AI company led by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Best recognized for its Facebook platform, the company has expanded its portfolio through the years by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp as well. 

Meta has also diversified its services beyond traditional social media over the years, including virtual reality and AI. It has released devices like VR headsets and smart glasses, while developing various open-weight AI models. Different areas of the business often overlap as well, as Meta continues to tailor its AI-driven products to individual consumers.  

What Does Meta Do? 

Facebook very much remains a part of the business, but Meta has expanded to encompass three main areas: 

• Social Media: Meta oversees several social media platforms, where users can create their own written and visual content and engage with each other online. They also provide vital revenue streams to sustain Meta’s overall business. 
• Mixed Reality: Meta is a dominant player in virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, inventing products that combine virtual elements with the real world. Its lineup of Meta Quest headsets is among the most popular devices in this niche.  
• AI Research: Meta has become heavily involved in AI research, developing a slate of open-weight large language models it calls the Llama family — and the Muse Spark model, which powers its Meta AI assistant. Artificial intelligence continues to steer the company’s direction as it seeks to catch up in the AI race.

Meta is known for its ability to adapt to the times, embracing the newest technologies that could potentially reshape people’s everyday lives. And perhaps no better change encapsulates this attitude than Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook as Meta in 2021. 

Meta’s Main Products and Platforms 

Meta has cultivated an extensive web of interconnected products to keep it at the forefront of the tech industry. Here are some of its most widely known offerings to date:  

• Facebook: As popular as ever, Facebook is Meta’s original, desktop-friendly platform that lets users connect to friends, join groups based on common topics or interests and buy and sell items through an online marketplace.
• Messenger: An instant messaging app that allows Facebook users to send and receive messages, photos and videos as well as make calls between each other. It originally launched as Facebook Chat in 2008 and integrated directly into the Facebook site, but now operates as a standalone app as of 2011.
• Instagram: Instagram is a mobile-first app that centers on visual content. Users can post and share videos and images along with written descriptions, while viewing content shared by personal connections, celebrities, organizations and other entities.
• Threads: A social media microblogging service where users can create text posts and hold public conversations, much like Twitter or X. Threads integrates closely with Instagram and requires an Instagram account to use the platform.
• WhatsApp: WhatsApp is a mobile app that requires only a phone number to set up an account. It’s ideal for global communication, enabling users to form group chats, send messages and make international calls for free.
• Meta AI Assistant: Meta’s personal AI assistant processes natural-language prompts, so users can quickly get food recommendations, look up locations, shop online and more. It’s been integrated across Meta’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. 
• Meta Glasses: Meta Glasses are AI-powered smart glasses that use Bluetooth to connect to other devices, allowing users to take calls, send messages, record videos and complete other actions normally done on their devices via voice commands and hand gestures. 
• Muse Code: A terminal coding agent powered by the Muse Spark 1.2 model. Muse Code can take on complex software engineering tasks across large repositories, including planning changes, writing code and validating results.

Meta’s Muse Models

• Muse Spark: Muse Spark is the first member of the Muse model family and now powers the Meta AI assistant. It stands out for its ability to orchestrate AI agents, process visual data and answer health-related inquiries. 
• Muse Spark 1.1: An expansion of the original Muse Spark model, Muse Spark 1.1 is multimodal and designed specifically for agentic coding. Meta says it can engage in multistep reasoning and handle complex processes, manage digital workflows, and deploy new features in enterprise systems.
• Muse Spark 1.2: A coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1 that powers the Muse Code agent. Muse Spark 1.2 is built with improvements in code generation, complex debugging, codebase understanding and end-to-end developer workflows.
• Muse Glimmer: An open-weight, 30-billion-parameter model designed for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer is a small enough model that it can run on PC or Mac computers with a single consumer GPU, allowing for use cases such as local agents, function calling, local coding and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation.
• Muse Image: An image generation model that can follow detailed instructions, edit precisely and create images from multiple references. Muse Image also features agentic tool use capabilities and can integrate with Muse Spark.
• Muse Video: A video generation model built on the same pretraining base as Muse Image. It offers performance in prompt adherence, visual fidelity and temporal consistency with native audio support.

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Why Facebook Became Meta 

According to a 2021 blog post, Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta because he believed in the future success of the metaverse, or the concept of a virtual world that combines digital and physical elements to support an immersive user experience. Facebook pivoted from being solely a social media company to a so-called “social technology company,” with its mixed-reality products supporting 3D entertainment, games, shopping and social engagement. 

Zuckerberg was so committed to the metaverse that Meta even established a platform called Meta Horizon, connecting its mixed-reality products into a single ecosystem. It was essentially a world-building strategy designed to foster a digital community that users could call their own for the long term, and the Meta brand better reflected this shift. 

Although Meta has since shifted much of its attention away from the metaverse and Meta Horizon (even shuttering the Horizon Worlds app briefly in 2026) in favor of artificial intelligence, it continues to operate under the Meta brand.

Meta vs. Facebook: What’s the Difference? 

Meta refers to the parent technology company owned by Zuckerberg, covering its social media, mixed reality and AI development. Under this umbrella falls Facebook, which now just refers to the specific social media platform.

Meta’s Focus on AI and the Metaverse

Despite Zuckerberg’s continued attempts to generate excitement around Meta’s virtual reality push, the metaverse never really caught on with the general public. As a result, the company has transitioned from its mixed-reality vision and reorganized its efforts around artificial intelligence, eliminating thousands of jobs in the process. 

This pivot began in earnest in mid-2025 when Zuckerberg first announced his idea for “personal superintelligence,” promoting AI-first products catering to individual consumers. To achieve this goal, Zuckerberg lured researchers from AI rivals with million-dollar offers to round out the new Meta Superintelligence Labs division. Meta further restructured its teams to align its AI initiatives under the MSL umbrella. 

Meta then closed out 2025 by funneling billions of dollars into data center projects, building the infrastructure necessary to train even more powerful AI models. These moves have set Meta up to compete for AI supremacy, although it will likely need untapped revenue sources to realize its goal of artificial superintelligence.

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How Meta Makes Money

Much of Meta’s revenue comes from advertisements on its social media platforms. In fact, the company is on track to finally rake in more net ad revenue than Google in 2026, making it the most lucrative digital ad business in the world. 

Even so, new revenue streams have become crucial to keep up with the ballooning costs of AI. Meta recently began rolling out subscription plans for its AI services, and Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all provide consumer subscription plans for those who want access to additional features. Zuckerberg has also proposed selling excess compute from Meta’s data centers, potentially entering the cloud computing business.

Notable Meta Developments

From pioneering major social media platforms to its bet on the metaverse, Meta has undergone several organizational transformations and mission shifts since its founding. Below are events that highlight how the company has changed from its debut as TheFacebook in 2004:

Muse Glimmer Release (August 2026)

Meta released Muse Glimmer, the first open-source model of the Muse family of models. Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows, and shows strong agentic use case performance in comparison to other leading frontier models of its size category. It is designed small enough to run on a PC or Mac computer with a single consumer GPU, allowing for tasks involving local agents, function calling, local coding and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation.

Muse Spark Release (April 2026)

Meta released Muse Spark, the first in Meta’s Muse family of models and the first AI model released by Meta Superintelligence Labs. Muse Spark is a multimodal reasoning model built with support for tool use, visual chain of thought and multi-agent orchestration. Meta stated that Muse Spark offered “competitive performance” in multimodal perception, reasoning, health and agentic tasks in comparison to other frontier models.

Meta Superintelligence Labs Division Founded (June 2025)

Meta created Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a company division that organizes all of Meta’s AI efforts in order to build toward personal superintelligence. MSL is led by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang at its launch, the former CEO of Scale AI. As of August 2025, MSL consists of Meta’s TBD Lab, Products and Applied Research, FAIR and MSL Infra teams. 

Facebook, Inc. Rebrands to Meta (October 2021)

Facebook, Inc. — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — rebranded to Meta. The brand change reflected the company’s new goal to invest in the metaverse, a shared online space for participating in immersive experiences. Meta initially described itself as a builder of technologies that help people connect and find communities, with the metaverse being seen by Zuckerberg as a next step and “ultimate dream” of social technology.

Facebook Acquires WhatsApp (February 2014)

Facebook acquired WhatsApp for approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and $12 billion worth of Facebook stock. The deal aimed to support “Facebook and WhatsApp’s shared mission to bring more connectivity and utility to the world,” and help drive growth and user engagement for both companies. With the acquisition, Facebook also stated that its Messenger app and WhatsApp’s core messaging product would continue to run as standalone applications.

Facebook Acquires Instagram (April 2012)

Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock, its largest acquisition deal to date at the time. While acquired, both Facebook and Instagram stated their intentions for Instagram to remain an independently-run company. The deal allowed Facebook to “work even more closely with the Instagram team to offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests,” according to Zuckerberg.

TheFacebook Rebrands to Facebook (September 2005)

TheFacebook dropped the “The” from its name, officially rebranding it to Facebook. The Facebook website also began allowing U.S. high school users to access it starting in September 2005, and then began allowing anyone aged 13 or older to access the site starting in September 2006.

TheFacebook Launch (February 2004)

Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launched TheFacebook, a social networking website for Harvard University students to create personal profiles and connect with one another online. Following its launch, TheFacebook quickly expanded to allow users from other Ivy League and U.S. universities to use the platform.

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