Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the \u201cgodfathers\u201d of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world\u2019s most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab.<\/p>\n
FAIR has since made a number of significant contributions to AI research, including in the field of computer vision. Although the division was not focused on advancing Facebook\u2019s social-networking products per se, the premise seemed to be that new AI tools could eventually support the company\u2019s core businesses, perhaps by improving content moderation or image captioning<\/a>. But for years, Facebook didn\u2019t develop AI as a stand-alone, consumer-facing product. Now, in the era of ChatGPT, the company lags behind.<\/p>\n Facebook, now called Meta, trails not just OpenAI and Google but also newer firms such as Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek\u2014all of which have launched advanced generative-AI models and chatbots over the past few years. In response, Zuckerberg\u2019s company quickly launched its own flagship model, Llama, but it has struggled relative to its competitors. In April, Meta proudly rolled out a Llama 4 model that Zuckerberg called a \u201cbeast\u201d<\/a>\u2014but after an experimental version of the model scored second in the world on a widely used benchmarking test, the version released to the public ranked only 32nd. In the past year, every other top AI lab has released new \u201creasoning\u201d models that, thanks to a new training paradigm<\/a>, are generally much better than previous chatbots at advanced math and coding problems; Meta has yet to deliver its own.<\/p>\n