Meta

Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) is one of the world's largest technology companies, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. With a market capitalization exceeding $1.5 trillion, Meta operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads — platforms that collectively serve over 3 billion daily active users worldwide.

Meta has become one of the most important players in AI through its open-source Llama model family and the Meta AI assistant. Llama models (including Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout with a 10 million token context window) are the most widely used open-weight language models in the world. In April 2026, Meta announced Muse Spark — its new proprietary flagship model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new organization led by Alexandr Wang (former Scale AI CEO, hired via a $14.3 billion deal). Muse Spark accepts voice, text, and image inputs and powers Meta AI across all Meta platforms. This marks a strategic shift: while the Llama series remains open-weight, Meta's most capable model is now proprietary.

Meta One is Meta's paid subscription brand, spanning Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and the Meta AI app. Meta AI remains free for casual users. Meta One Plus runs $7.99 per month, with a $19.99 Meta One Premium tier above it that unlocks deeper thinking-mode reasoning and expanded image and video generation. Two creator and business tiers — Meta One Essential at $14.99 and Meta One Advanced at $49.99 — round out the lineup. The shift marks Meta's first revenue stream for AI beyond advertising, a structural change for a company whose AI strategy had previously been defined by the choice to monetize through ads rather than subscriptions.

Meta has also signaled a move into premium AI agents with Hatch, an announced consumer agent that builds software tools and handles tasks like scheduling and email from plain-language prompts. A consumer version of Meta's OpenClaw agent, Hatch is expected to launch in the US around July 2026 with free and premium tiers, and Meta is reportedly weighing a price of up to $200 a month for the top tier — which would make it the company's first standalone paid AI agent, positioned directly against premium subscriptions from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Meta's 2026 AI capital expenditure is projected at $115 to $135 billion — among the largest infrastructure investments by any company. The company's FAIR research lab continues producing influential AI research. Llama 4 Behemoth (288 billion active parameters) has been deprioritized in favor of the Muse Spark roadmap.