[SAN FRANCISCO] Meta Platforms chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a major restructuring of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) group, including a commitment to developing AI “superintelligence”, or systems that can complete tasks as well as or even better than humans.
Zuckerberg wrote on Monday (Jun 30) to employees that Meta’s AI efforts will fall under a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, which will be led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labelling startup Scale AI, according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg. Wang, whom Zuckerberg called the “most impressive founder of his generation”, will serve as chief AI officer.
Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Github, will “partner with Alex to lead” the group, Zuckerberg continued, and head Meta’s work on AI products and applied research. Bloomberg previously reported on Zuckerberg’s effort to recruit a new superintelligence group.
“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in the internal post. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.”
Meta will spend “hundreds of billions” on AI projects and research in the years to come, Zuckerberg has said, though the Facebook founder also expects that many firms will likely overspend on AI in an effort to avoid missing the wave.
“There’s a meaningful chance that a lot of the companies are overbuilding now,” he said last summer. “But on the flip side, I actually think all the companies that are investing are making a rational decision, because the downside of being behind is that you are out of position for, like, the most important technology for the next 10 to 15 years.”
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Meta shares were little changed at 2.30 pm in New York, after reaching an all-time high of US$747.90 earlier in the day.
The new MSL unit will include the company’s existing teams focused on large language models, which is the technology that underpins generative AI, as well as AI products, and the Fundamental AI Research team, known as Fair. Meta is also creating a “new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models”, Zuckerberg wrote.
AI has become Zuckerberg’s top focus this year as he competes with rivals such as OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google to develop state-of-the-art models and AI assistants that he hopes will one day become ubiquitous. That spending has come in the form of infrastructure, such as chips and data centres, and in recruiting personnel and acquisitions.
Earlier this month Meta invested US$14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired Wang in the process. Meta has also held deal talks with Perplexity AI and Runway AI, and is expected to acquire PlayAI, a small startup using AI to replicate voices.
Zuckerberg has worked personally to recruit talent for Meta’s AI teams. He’s hosted potential hires at his homes in Palo Alto, California, and Lake Tahoe and has been leading much of the initial outreach himself. Meta has offered some researchers compensation packages, including stock awards, in the tens of millions of US dollars, a sign of Meta’s commitment to AI and the competition in the industry.
In addition to the newly structured team, Zuckerberg announced 11 new hires for the group, including researchers and software engineers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. The group includes former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun; several OpenAI researchers, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren; and Anthropic’s Joel Pobar, a software engineer who previously worked at Meta for over a decade. Bloomberg previously reported some of these hires. BLOOMBERG
