Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Meta
Founded Facebook, hired Yann LeCun to start FAIR, backed open-weight Llama, then rebuilt Meta's AI effort in 2025.
Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook at Harvard in February 2004 and has run it ever since; the company renamed itself Meta in October 2021. Zuckerberg's first large bet on AI came in December 2013, when Facebook hired the NYU professor Yann LeCun to build an artificial intelligence lab with offices in Menlo Park, New York and London. That lab, FAIR, published its research openly and released PyTorch, which Meta handed to a Linux Foundation body in 2022.
From 2023 Zuckerberg made openness a company strategy. Meta released Llama 2 with downloadable weights and a commercial license in July 2023, and in July 2024, alongside the 405-billion-parameter Llama 3.1, Zuckerberg published "Open Source AI is the Path Forward," a letter comparing open models to Linux. The poor reception of Llama 4 in April 2025 changed course. In June 2025 Meta invested 14.3 billion dollars in Scale AI and hired its founder, Alexandr Wang, as chief AI officer; on 30 June Zuckerberg told staff that "developing superintelligence is coming into sight" and created Meta Superintelligence Labs. Zuckerberg recruited many of its researchers personally, and Sam Altman said Meta had offered some OpenAI staff signing bonuses of up to 100 million dollars.
The new lab's first model, Muse Spark, shipped in April 2026 without open weights. On 10 August 2026 Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay, "The Future is for Everyone," arguing that superintelligence should be distributed to individuals rather than concentrated in a few labs, and promised open weights for Muse Spark 1.2. At Meta Connect on 23 September 2026 Zuckerberg said Meta was "going all in on Muse," its new personal agent.
Known for
Llama and the open-weights strategy
Committed Meta to releasing Llama model weights from 2023 and argued in a July 2024 letter that open models would become the industry standard, as Linux had for servers.
Meta Superintelligence Labs
Reorganized all of Meta's AI teams under Alexandr Wang in June 2025 after an investment of 14.3 billion dollars in Scale AI and a personal recruiting drive among OpenAI and Google researchers.
Personal superintelligence
Set out in letters of July 2025 and August 2026 the goal of an AI agent for every person, which Meta shipped as Muse in September 2026.
On the record
Zuckerberg argued in July 2024 that open models are safer than closed ones because anyone can inspect them.
“open source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized.”
Zuckerberg wrote in August 2026 that warnings of doom from other AI developers point toward a dangerous concentration of power, and that safety comes from a balance of power.
“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic.”
Career
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2004-present
Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Sources
- Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (Meta)
- Facebook's 'Deep Learning' Guru Reveals the Future of AI (Wired, December 2013)
- Open Source AI is the Path Forward (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, July 2024)
- Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo (CNBC, June 2025)
- Personal Superintelligence (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, July 2025)
- The Future is for Everyone (Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, August 2026)
- Meta to open source its most powerful AI model as it takes swipe at OpenAI, Anthropic (CNBC, August 2026)
- Everything new coming to Meta's AI agent Muse (TechCrunch, September 2026)
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