Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, and studied computer science at Harvard University.1

Harvard later welcomed Zuckerberg back as the featured speaker at the Afternoon Program of its 366th Commencement in May 2017, when the university awarded Zuckerberg an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. In that address, Zuckerberg told graduates that the challenge for their generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.34

Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004; the company was incorporated in Delaware in July of that year, and Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Palo Alto, California. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse, moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality.123

Meta describes its mission as building the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible. Its family of apps includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Meta AI, Threads, and WhatsApp, while its Reality Labs work includes Meta Quest virtual reality devices, Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta AI glasses, the Meta Ray-Ban Display with the Meta Neural Band, and the Orion augmented reality glasses prototype.2

Meta has shared major AI tools with the world. In September 2022, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was moving PyTorch, the open source AI framework led by Meta researchers, to the Linux Foundation. In February 2023, as part of Meta's commitment to open science, the company publicly released LLaMA, a foundational large language model.56

In July 2024, Zuckerberg published "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward", arguing that AI will develop much as Linux did and that open source is necessary for a positive AI future. The letter introduced Llama 3.1 405B, which Meta called the first frontier-level open source AI model. In April 2025, Meta followed with the Llama 4 herd, natively multimodal models including Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick.78

In July 2025, Zuckerberg laid out Meta's vision to bring personal superintelligence to everyone, putting that power in people's hands so they can direct it toward what they value in their own lives.9

Meta Superintelligence Labs went on to rebuild Meta's AI stack from the ground up, and in April 2026 announced Muse Spark, the first in a new series of large language models. In September 2026, Meta introduced Muse, a personal AI agent that does not just answer questions but actually does the work, running on its own dedicated computer in the cloud.1011

Zuckerberg co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015 and serves as its co-CEO. The initiative works on challenges ranging from eradicating disease and improving education to addressing the needs of local communities, through collaboration, resources, and technology.1