Meta AI

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

History

Meta AI was founded in 2013 as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR).[1][2] It has workspaces in Menlo Park, London, New York City, Paris, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Tel Aviv, and Montreal as of 2025.[3][4]

In 2016, FAIR partnered with Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft in creating the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.

Meta AI was directed by Yann LeCun until 2018, when Jérôme Pesenti succeeded the role. Pesenti is formerly the CTO of IBM's big data group.[5]

FAIR's research includes self-supervised learning, generative adversarial networks, document classification and translation, and computer vision.[6] FAIR released Torch deep-learning modules as well as PyTorch in 2017, an open-source machine learning framework,[6] which was subsequently used in several deep learning technologies, such as Tesla's autopilot [7] and Uber's Pyro.[8] That same year, a pair of chatbots were falsely rumored[9] to be discontinued for developing a language that was unintelligible to humans.[10] 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.[9]

FAIR was renamed Meta AI following the rebranding that changed Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc.[11]

On October 1, 2025, Facebook announced "We will soon use your interactions with AI at Meta to personalize the content and ads you see".[12]

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.[13] It is also available as a subscription-based stand-alone app.[14][15]

The virtual assistant was pre-installed on the second generation of Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, and can incorporate inputs from the glasses' cameras after an update.[16] It is also available on Quest 2 and newer HMDs.[17]

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.[18]

Current research

Controversy

The French media outlet Mediapart reports that in 2022, Facebook's parent company illegally used works accumulated by the pirate site LibGen to train its artificial intelligence.[28]

External links