Meta AI Glossary

AI research and product division of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). Makers of the *Llama* family of open-weights language models — the most-downloaded open-source LLM line as of 2026.

Meta AI is the artificial intelligence research and product division of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.). Its most consequential contribution to the broader AI ecosystem has been the Llama family of open-weights large language models, first released in early 2023 under a partially-open licence and later expanded to a more genuinely open release with subsequent versions. Llama is the most-downloaded open-weights LLM family as of 2026 and the practical foundation for a large swath of the local-compute / Sovereign Compute ecosystem the Dictionary covers.

Meta’s broader AI work includes substantial research output (their FAIR lab has been one of the most productive in the field for over a decade), the Meta AI consumer assistant integrated into Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, and the Reality Labs hardware effort. Strategically, Meta’s open-weights posture is a deliberate competitive move against the closed-weights labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind): by releasing competitive base models, Meta lowers the value of the proprietary-model moat without itself depending on consumer AI subscriptions.

The PRC’s May 2026 block of Meta’s acquisition of *Manus * (covered in Commercial Legibility) is one of the structural data points the Dictionary treats as evidence that agent-platform infrastructure is now classified as strategic technology by major states.

See also

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