The company’s artificial intelligence initiatives have been restructured by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg under a new branch named Meta Superintelligence Labs, a source said on Monday.
Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, a data labeling business, will lead the division. According to the source, he will serve as the new initiative’s chief AI officer at the massive social media company.
The high-stakes move comes after key personnel left and Meta’s most recent open-source Llama 4 model was poorly received, which allowed competitors like Google, OpenAI, and China’s DeepSeek to gain ground in the AI competition.
In addition to helping develop new revenue streams from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad solutions, and smart eyewear, Zuckerberg thinks the new lab will expedite work on artificial general intelligence—machines that are capable of thinking more intelligently than humans.
Zuckerberg personally oversaw a vigorous talent drive throughout the last month, pursuing potential employees directly on WhatsApp with multimillion-dollar compensation packages and putting forth proposals for firms, such as Safe Superintelligence (SSI), co-founded by Ilya Sutskever of OpenAI.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram made a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier this month.
According to reports, Daniel Gross, the co-founder and CEO of SSI, will join the new division in addition to Wang and a few employees of Scale AI.
According to the source, Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the Superintelligence Labs and oversee the business’s efforts in applied research and AI solutions.
According to the source, Zuckerberg has also added 11 additional AI researchers, including experts from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
The source claims that the new hires include Joel Pobar of Anthropic, who previously worked at Meta for more than ten years, former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, as well as a number of OpenAI alums, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said earlier this month that Meta had recruited his staff by offering them bonuses totaling $100 million.
However, other experts are concerned that Meta’s AGI wager could be just another chance for short-term gains. Since 2020, its second major investment, the Reality Labs division, has spent over $60 billion with little to show for it other than the Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart spectacles.
It is anticipated that large tech businesses would spend $320 billion on AI this year.
Amazon stole important talent from Adept in 2024, while Microsoft paid $650 million to acquire the majority of Inflection AI’s employees, including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman.
Although SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son predicts the breakthrough would occur within ten years, Yann LeCun, Meta’s top AI scientist, has stated that existing approaches will not be sufficient to accomplish the technology’s holy grail.
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