Meta Launches 'Superintelligence Labs' in Bold AI Restructuring Move

Meta restructures its AI unit under 'Superintelligence Labs' | TechCrunch

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is restructuring the company's AI efforts to center around building AI "superintelligence." Going forward, all teams working on AI at Meta will fall under a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to Bloomberg, which viewed an internal memo sent Monday. Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI, will lead the group as chief AI officer. He'll partner with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who will oversee Meta's AI products and applied research, per Bloomberg. Zuckerberg has been working hard to get ahead of the AGI race, mainly by acquiring AI companies and employees from top AI firms. Earlier this month, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, bringing on Wang in the process. Zuckerberg has also been able to lure 11 new AI researchers from competitors, according to the report, including some previously unreported hires such as Google DeepMind principal researcher Pei Sun and Anthropic engineer Joel Pobar.

Here Is Everyone Mark Zuckerberg Has Hired So Far for Meta's 'Superintelligence' Team

Mark Zuckerberg notified Meta staff today to introduce them to the new superintelligence team. The memo, which WIRED obtained, lists names and bios for the recently hired employees, many of whom came from rival AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Over the past few months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a recruiting frenzy to poach some of the most sought after talent in AI. The social media giant has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its CEO, to run Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL). News of the memo was first reported by Bloomberg. "We're going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo on Monday. Meta declined to comment. Zuckerberg introduced Wang, who will be the company's "Chief AI Officer" and leader of MSL, as well as former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman will colead the new lab with Wang, with a focus on AI products and applied research. Here's the list of all the new hires as seen in Zuckerberg's memo. It notably doesn't include the employees who joined from OpenAI's Zurich office.

OpenAI Leadership Responds to Meta Offers: 'Someone Has Broken Into Our Home'

As Mark Zuckerberg lures away top research talent to Meta, OpenAI executives say they're 'recalibrating comp,' according to an internal memo. Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head-to-head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by WIRED, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's superintelligence lab. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders at the company "around the clock to talk to those with offers," adding, "we've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent." Still, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has "high personal standards of fairness," and wants to retain top talent with that in mind. "While I'll fight to keep every one of you, I won't do so at the price of fairness to others," he wrote. The news comes as competition for top AI researchers is heating up in Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg has been particularly aggressive in his approach, offering $100 million signing bonuses to some OpenAI staffers, according to comments Altman made on a podcast with his brother, Jack Altman. Multiple sources at OpenAI with direct knowledge of the offers confirmed the number. The Meta CEO has also been personally reaching out to potential recruits, according to the Wall Street Journal. "Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages," Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to the efforts at Meta confirmed the company has been significantly ramping up its research recruiting, with a particular eye toward talent from OpenAI and Google. Anthropic, while also a top rival, is thought to be less of a culture fit at Meta, one source tells WIRED. "They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky is the limit," the source says. Both OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment. Chen's note included messages from seven other research leaders at the company, where they wrote notes to staffers in an apparent effort to encourage them to stay. One leader on the research team encouraged staff to reach out if they received an offer from Meta: "If they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, it's not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision. WIRED is not naming the leader as they are not a C-suite executive. "I'd like to be able to talk to you through it and I know all about their offers."

Meta's new AI lab aims to deliver 'personal superintelligence for everyone' - whatever that means

Meta has launched a new internal R&D division devoted to building artificial superintelligence, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The division, called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), will be led by Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, the former CEOs of Scale AI and GitHub, respectively. It will also be joined by seven ex-OpenAI engineers, according to an internal memo from CEO Mark Zuckerberg obtained by CNBC. Meta's plans to launch the new division were first reported last month. Also: Can AI outdiagnose doctors? Microsoft's tool is 4 times better for complex cases "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. "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." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed a similar belief in a recent blog post, adding that OpenAI was first and foremost "a superintelligence research company." MSL's primary mission, Zuckerberg wrote in his internal memo, will be to deliver "personal superintelligence for everyone." In classic tech industry fashion, this statement is both breathlessly grandiose and deeply vague. Artificial superintelligence is typically defined as a computer system with capabilities that are exponentially more advanced than those of any human brain. It would mark a major technical leap forward from artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could match humans' performance across virtually every economically valuable task. Also: AI will handle half of all business decisions by 2027 - Gartner report Like AGI, superintelligence is currently both completely hypothetical and lacks a single, universally agreed-upon definition. The term was popularized by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in his 2014 book of the same name, which primarily served as a warning about the dangers of the unconstrained growth of AI. Zuckerberg didn't offer much clarity in his memo surrounding what "personal superintelligence for everyone" might entail, but he intimated that MSL would evolve in unison with the company's Llama family of large language models, as well as with its Smart Glasses division. Also: Anthropic says Claude helps emotionally support users - we're not convinced Judging by the fact that all of the ex-OpenAI engineers on the MSL roster played some role in building that company's o-series of models, it's a safe bet that the new division will prioritize the development of reasoning models, which could be a core part of Meta's long-term roadmap to building its vision of superintelligence. Zuckerberg's commitment to making Meta the leader in AI development has been made starkly apparent by the company's recent efforts to poach top talent from its competitors. Altman has said Meta offered employees from his company a $100 million signing bonus -- a staggering sum even by Silicon Valley standards -- though one former ex-OpenAI engineer called this "fake news" in a X post last week. Also: Are software professionals truly an endangered species? It's complicated Meta isn't alone. As AI investment -- and hype -- continues to grow, virtually every big tech firm has sought to attract top talent, now the industry's most vital resource. Many have also purchased smaller AI start-ups to boost their competitive edge; Apple, for example, is reportedly weighing an acquisition of the AI-powered online search company Perplexity. Meanwhile, as the industry's more experienced pros are finding handsomely salaried homes inside some of tech's biggest firms, AI appears to be making it more difficult for younger, less experienced engineers to get hired. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI 'superintelligence' super-group

Jay Peters is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. In a memo to Meta staff, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company's new "Meta Superintelligence Labs" group that will head up its AI work, Bloomberg reports. Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta as part of a multibillion dollar deal earlier this month, will head up the group as the company's chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will "partner with" Wang to help lead the division, according to Bloomberg. Meta has also made 11 new AI-focused hires, including former Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI employees. Zuckerberg has been making huge offers to potential hires - The Verge's Alex Heath has reported that they're "well into the eight-figure range" - to bolster its AI efforts, which have fallen behind other big AI companies. Meta has also held talks to buy companies like Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, Perplexity, and Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, though "none of these talks progressed to the formal offer stage for various reasons," Heath reported. Meta is also planning to "start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so," Zuckerberg said in the memo, which was published in full by CNBC.

Zuckerberg Announces Meta 'Superintelligence' Effort, More Hires

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a major restructuring of the company's artificial intelligence group, including a commitment to developing AI "superintelligence," or systems that can complete tasks as well as or even better than humans. Zuckerberg wrote Monday to employees that Meta's AI efforts will fall under a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labeling 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.

Meta deepens AI push with 'Superintelligence' lab, source says

June 30 (Reuters) - Meta (META.O), opens new tab CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganized the company's artificial intelligence efforts under a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to a source on Monday. The division will be headed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI. He will be the chief AI officer of the new initiative at the social media giant, the source said. The high-stakes push follows senior staff departures and a poor reception for Meta's latest open-source Llama 4 model, challenges that have allowed rivals including Google, OpenAI and China's DeepSeek to seize momentum in the AI race. Zuckerberg hopes the new lab will fast-track work on artificial general intelligence - machines that can outthink humans - and help create new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses. Over the past month, Zuckerberg personally led an aggressive talent raid, floating offers for startups including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and courting prospects directly on WhatsApp with million-dollar pay packages. Earlier this month, the Facebook and Instagram parent invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Apart from Wang and some Scale AI staff, the new division will reportedly include SSI's co-founder and CEO, Daniel Gross. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the Superintelligence Labs with Wang and head the company's work on AI products and applied research, according to the source. Zuckerberg has also brought on 11 new hires in the AI field, including researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the source said. The new appointments include former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun; several OpenAI alumni such as Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren; as well as Anthropic's Joel Pobar, who previously spent more than a decade at Meta, according to the source. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them. But some analysts worry that Meta's AGI bet could be another moonshot to yield near-term returns. Its other big bet, the Reality Labs unit, has burned through more than $60 billion since 2020, with little to show beyond the Ray-Ban smart glasses and Quest headsets. Together, big tech companies are expected to spend $320 billion on AI this year. In 2024, Microsoft spent $650 million to scoop up most of Inflection AI's staff, including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, while Amazon poached key talent from Adept. Yet the finish line for AGI remains elusive: Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has said current methods will not be enough to reach the holy grail of the technology, while SoftBank's Masayoshi Son pegs the breakthrough within a decade. Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

AI talent wars lead to superstar salaries for top tech staff

Melissa Heikkilä and Clara Murray in London and Cristina Criddle in San Francisco The intense battle to poach top artificial intelligence researchers and engineers from rivals has seen a rapid escalation in wages, as tech groups such as Meta and OpenAI race to gain the competitive edge in the fast-developing technology. OpenAI told staff in recent days it is seeking "creative ways to recognise and reward top talent" after losing key employees to rivals, despite industry data suggesting the ChatGPT maker offers salaries near the top of the market. Its latest move came after chief Sam Altman said Meta had promised $100mn sign-on bonuses to its most high-profile AI engineers. Across the tech industry, senior AI research scientists in Silicon Valley are being lured with far higher remuneration than computer engineers without AI experience, according to tech industry hiring specialists and recent data on job moves. While some top AI engineers are being paid more than $10mn a year, typical pay packages were between $3mn and $7mn -- representing a rise of about 50 per cent from 2022. "It has just become manically more hyper intense over the past few years, to the point where it feels like certain players are willing to do anything or whatever it takes to bring that talent into the organisation," said Kyle Langworthy, a partner specialising in AI recruiting at Riviera Partners. In particular, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has stepped up his push to poach big names in the sector after the launch of its latest large language model, Llama 4, underwhelmed critics after it underperformed on independent reasoning and coding benchmarks. This month the $1.8tn company invested $15bn into data-labelling start-up Scale AI and hired its co-founder Alexandr Wang to build a team working on "superintelligence". Over the weekend, Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI sent an internal memo saying that he felt "as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something" following recent staff departures. OpenAI has given staff the week off to rest and recharge, according to people close to the company. Chen added that Meta was trying to "take advantage" of the planned break to pressure employees to make decisions on job offers. Chen said he and Altman were working "around the clock to talk to those with offers," adding, "we've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognise and reward top talent." The memo was first reported by Wired. There has been a steady rise in salaries across the AI sector, according to tech recruitment firm Harrison Clarke. Mid to senior level research scientists can today expect total pay packages of between $500,000 to $2mn at Big Tech groups, up from $400,000 to $900,000 in 2022. In comparison, senior software engineers without AI experience typically earn a base salary of between $180,000 to $220,000. Meta pays some of the highest remuneration to AI engineers, ranging from $186,000 to $3.2mn, according to financial package tracking website Levels. OpenAI offers a range of about $212,000 to $2.5mn -- but its median pay is higher, suggesting the typical engineer at the $300bn start-up earns more than at Meta. But researchers often prioritise the reputation of team leaders and the quality of work over the huge sums of cash being offered, according to AI recruiters. Researchers are "incentivised by the type of work they're doing. And there's always a risk, if you end up in a Meta, you're not going to be doing the level of work that you might do at a DeepMind or an OpenAI, or an Anthropic," according to Firas Sozan, chief executive of Harrison Clarke. Other industries such as insurance, entertainment and financial services are also increasing the hiring of AI engineers and researchers. However, Riviera's Langworthy said "it can be extremely challenging to hire your AI, engineering, and product team when you're a lesser-known company." The sky-high price tag for talent is pushing some tech groups, such as open source AI start-up Hugging Face, to turn their recruitment search to Europe. "If you take one software engineer in the Bay Area right now, you can have three to four people of roughly the same level in Europe," said Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer at Hugging Face. Jonas Andrulis, founder and chief executive officer of German AI start-up Aleph Alpha, which has grown its team sixfold year-on-year, said candidates are increasingly asking about research freedom, the ability to publish and the societal impact of their work. "Topics like sustainability, ethical alignment, and solving real-world problems also come up more often," he said, adding that Aleph Alpha's growth "is a testament to something money alone can't buy: belief in a mission".

Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms. Artificial intelligence has been an integral focus for the tech giant's leader amid competition from players like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that he's creating Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by some of his company's most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Zuckerberg said the new AI superintelligence unit, MSL, will house the company's various teams working on foundation models, like the open-source Llama software, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) projects, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC. Bloomberg first reported about the new unit. Meta's co-founder and CEO has been on an AI hiring blitz as he faces fierce competition from rivals like OpenAI and Google. Earlier in June, the company said it would hire Wang, now Meta's chief AI officer, and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into Scale AI. Meta also hired Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, who was CEO of Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup created by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, CNBC earlier reported. Meta had attempted to buy Safe Superintelligence, but was rebuffed by Sutskever. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast that Meta was recruiting AI researchers from his company, offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth told CNBC's "Closing Bell Overtime" in an interview on June 20, that OpenAI was countering Meta's offers. "The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive," Bosworth said. Here is Zuckerberg's full internal memo released on Monday: As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. 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. Today I want to share some details about how we're organizing our AI efforts to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone. We're going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models. Alexandr Wang has joined Meta to serve as our Chief AI Officer and lead MSL. Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence, and as co-founder and CEO he built ScaleAI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of almost all leading models across the industry. Nat Friedman has also joined Meta to partner with Alex to lead MSL, heading our work on AI products and applied research. Nat will work with Connor to define his role going forward. He ran GitHub at Microsoft, and most recently has run one of the leading AI investment firms. Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do. We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I'm excited to share as well: I'm excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2. These models power Meta AI, which is used by more than 1 billion monthly actives across our apps and an increasing number of agents across Meta that help improve our products and technology. We're committed to continuing to build out these models. In parallel, we're going to start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort. We're still forming this group and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well. Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world. We have a strong business that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs. We have deeper experience building and growing products that reach billions of people. We are pioneering and leading the AI glasses and wearables category that is growing very quickly. And our company structure allows us to move with vastly greater conviction and boldness. I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone.

Meta shares hit all-time high as Mark Zuckerberg goes on AI hiring blitz

Meta shares hit a record high on Monday, underscoring investor interest in the company's new AI superintelligence group. The company's shares reached $747.90 during midday trading, topping Meta's previous stock market record in February when it began laying off the 5% of its workforce that it deemed "low performers." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an AI hiring blitz amid fierce competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Google-parent Alphabet. Earlier in June, Meta said it would hire Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into the executive's data labelling and annotation startup. The social media company also hired Nat Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, the chief of Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup with a valuation of $32 billion, CNBC reported earlier this month. Meta's attempts to buy Safe Superintelligence were rebuffed by the startup's founder and AI expert Ilya Sutskever, the report noted. Wang and Friedman are the leaders of Meta's new Superintelligence Labs, tasked with overseeing the company's artificial intelligence foundation models, projects and research, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. Bloomberg News first reported about the new superintelligence unit. Meta has also snatched AI researchers from OpenAI. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, said during a podcast that Meta was offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's technology chief, spoke about the social media company's AI hiring spree during an interview with CNBC's "Closing Bell Overtime," saying that the talent market is "really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive."

A.I. Frenzy Escalates as OpenAI, Amazon and Meta Supersize Spending

Companies like OpenAI, Amazon and Meta have supersized their spending on artificial intelligence, with no signs of slowing down. Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence frenzy has found a new gear. Two and a half years after OpenAI set off the artificial intelligence race with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT, tech companies are accelerating their A.I. spending, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into their frantic effort to create systems that can mimic or even exceed the abilities of the human brain. The tech industry's giants are building data centers that can cost more than $100 billion and will consume more electricity than a million American homes. Salaries for A.I. experts are jumping as Meta offers signing bonuses to A.I. researchers that top $100 million. And venture capitalists are dialing up their spending. U.S. investment in A.I. companies rose to $65 billion in the first quarter, up 33 percent from the previous quarter and up 550 percent from the quarter before ChatGPT came out in 2022, according to data from PitchBook, which tracks the industry. "Everyone is deeply afraid of being left behind," said Chris V. Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures who focuses on A.I. technologies. This astonishing spending, critics argue, comes with a huge risk. A.I. is arguably more expensive than anything the tech industry has tried to build, and there is no guarantee it will live up to its potential. But the bigger risk, many executives believe, is not spending enough to keep pace with rivals. "The thinking from the big C.E.O.s is that they can't afford to be wrong by doing too little, but they can afford to be wrong by doing too much," said Jordan Jacobs, a partner with the venture capital firm Radical Ventures. Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

Mark Zuckerberg Ramps Up Meta's A.I. Spending as Competition Heats Up

Mike Isaac has reported on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta since 2010. Cade Metz has reported on artificial intelligence since that same year. In April, Mark Zuckerberg's lofty plans for the future of artificial intelligence crashed into reality. Weeks earlier, the 41-year-old chief executive of Meta had publicly boasted that his company's new A.I. model, which would power the latest chatbots and other cutting-edge experiments, would be a "beast." Internally, Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that he wanted it to rival the A.I. systems of competitors like OpenAI and be able to drive features such as voice-powered chatbots, people who spoke with him said. But at Meta's A.I. conference that month, the new A.I. model did not perform as well as those of rivals. Features like voice interactions were not ready. Many developers, who attended the event with high expectations, left underwhelmed. Mr. Zuckerberg knew Meta was falling behind in A.I., people close to him said, which was unacceptable. He began strategizing in a WhatsApp group with top executives, including Chris Cox, Meta's head of product, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, about what to do. That kicked off a frenzy of activity that has reverberated across Silicon Valley. Mr. Zuckerberg demoted Meta's vice president in charge of generative A.I. He then invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its 28-year-old founder. Meta approached other start-ups, including the A.I. search engine Perplexity, about deals. And Mr. Zuckerberg and his colleagues have embarked on a hiring binge, including reaching out this month to more than 45 A.I. researchers at rival OpenAI alone and offering them compensation packages as high as $100 million each, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Four OpenAI researchers have accepted offers from the company.

Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Win AI by Copying Everyone Smarter Than Him

Meta’s CEO is trying to buy his way to the front of the AI race, poaching top talent and eyeing startups. But can money replace innovation? Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite move? Copy, poach, repeat. It made him one of the richest people on the planet. Now, he’s dusting off that playbook for his biggest challenge yet: the AI race. Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is on a hiring and buying spree, throwing eye-watering sums at top AI researchers and startups in a last-ditch effort to catch up to OpenAI, Google, and upstart rivals like DeepSeek. It’s a full-court press to convince the tech world and investors that Meta still matters in the AI race. But here's the twist: Zuckerberg is raiding everyone else's. In the past few weeks, Zuckerberg AI team has: So far, Meta has nabbed several big names: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai (formerly OpenAI), and others like Trapit Bansal and Jack Rae, who left Google DeepMind. The company also reportedly tried (and failed) to lure high-profile AI researchers like OpenAI’s Noam Brown and Google’s Koray Kavukcuoglu. The unit’s mission? To build AI systems smarter than humans. Yes, really. This is Zuckerberg’s version of the Thanos snap: collect the stones, snap his fingers, and will himself to the front of the AI line. Zuckerberg is also throwing cash at startups. Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and is in talks to acquire PlayAI, which develops eerily human-sounding voice agents. There were also feelers sent to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s new lab Thinking Machines. If it feels like Zuckerberg is panic-buying his way through the AI mall before the shelves are empty, that’s because he kind of is. Meta's AI assistant, Meta AI, is currently no match for OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, or DeepSeek’s R1. Those models can reason. Meta’s can reply. It's like asking a toddler to outwit a chess master. And that’s the problem: Meta doesn’t just want to catch up; it wants to leapfrog. Zuckerberg knows he can't wait years for homegrown breakthroughs. So he's doing what he’s always done best: copy, buy, and scale fast. It’s the Facebook playbook all over again. Stories, Reels, Threads: all riffs on rival ideas. And now, AI. Meta is behind in the AI race. Big time. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek’s R1 can reason, plan, and problem-solve. Meta’s AI? It’s still playing catch-up, better at small talk than solving real problems. Build AI that can think and reason, like OpenAI’s and Google’s best systems, and do it fast enough to stay relevant in the AI arms race. OpenAI’s next models are about to go open source. That could erase Meta’s last advantage: its free, open AI models that developers love. Zuckerberg has declared 2025 the year of AI for Meta. It has to be. The company’s ad business is under pressure, Threads is floundering, and TikTok is still eating Instagram’s lunch. Meanwhile, OpenAI is flirting with becoming a full-on social network, threatening Meta on its home turf. The new plan is to go all-in on “reasoning agents," AI tools that can think through problems step-by-step, not just autocomplete your thoughts. These agents could power business assistants, customer support bots, or even future consumer apps. But Meta needs one thing first: actual intelligence. Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman is rolling his eyes. In a recent podcast with his brother, he said Meta’s strategy is obvious: “copy OpenAI, try to poach talent, outspend everyone.†But Altman warns that copying doesn’t build a culture of innovation, and culture is what wins in the long run. “I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,†Altman told his brother. But "their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped. And I respect like being aggressive and continuing to try new things." He didn’t stop there. "They started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses," Altman said, adding:"It is crazy." He accused Meta of "just trying to copy OpenAI, down to the UI mistakes,†Altman added. Altman even called out Facebook’s addiction to attention-hacking, saying OpenAI wants to be “the only tech company that doesn’t feel adversarial.†Translation: Meta tries to hack your brain; we’re trying to help it. Zuckerberg has always been a fast follower, not a first mover. This worked for social media. And if history is any guide, he’ll land a few hits. He’s great at absorbing features, scaling fast, and bulldozing rivals with sheer force. But the AI race is different. It’s about innovation. So far, Meta’s biggest AI play is its wallet. Whether that’s enough to win a race where originality matters as much as firepower remains to be seen. For now, Zuckerberg is betting that you can’t lose if you buy everyone who knows how to win. But in a world where AI shapes power, privacy, and the future of work, we all have a stake in whether these strategies actually produce safe, useful tech, or just more hype.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Want to Control AI by Crushing ChatGPT's Father

Inside the AI snake pit: The battle for AI supremacy is a brutal, high-stakes clash of towering egos, shocking betrayals, and world-changing ambitions. The AI race was never going to be polite. But what’s unfolding in Silicon Valley in 2025 looks more like Succession meets Black Mirror than a traditional tech rivalry. Forget code. This is about power, control, and a rapidly closing window to dominate the most transformative technology in history. At the center of the fight: three men, three worldviews, and one finish line. Let’s break down the combatants. This one is personal and litigious. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit devoted to building safe, open-source artificial intelligence. But the bromance collapsed when Musk attempted to take control of the company in 2018 and failed. He left bitterly and has been attacking OpenAI ever since. In 2023, Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, accusing them of betraying the nonprofit’s mission by aligning too closely with Microsoft and putting profit over safety. The lawsuit is still grinding through federal court. Among other things, it claims OpenAI’s flagship product, ChatGPT, is a closed-source commercial weapon funded by Big Tech and wrapped in secrecy. Altman denies the betrayal and OpenAI has countersued. The legal drama is thick and both sides have subpoenaed internal documents. Meanwhile, Musk’s xAI is developing its own ChatGPT rival and launching it on X (formerly Twitter). This is a very public and very expensive fight over who gets to define ethical AI. Stakes: Both want to build AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, a system smarter than humans. Musk wants to do it his way with radical transparency and no corporate strings. Altman wants to do it with Microsoft money, oversight, and a mission-first approach. The future of AI safety and perhaps civilization is the prize. They were supposed to be on the same team. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI and uses ChatGPT to power Bing, Copilot, and Azure. But now the two companies are increasingly at odds and headed for a potential breach. Microsoft has quietly built its own internal AI team called MAI, which is developing foundation models independent of OpenAI. The company wants more control, fewer surprises, and possibly a total replacement. Altman, meanwhile, has turned OpenAI into a hybrid nonprofit-corporate juggernaut. He’s building custom chips, launching an AI app store, and moving fast into hardware and enterprise services. Microsoft sees this as direct competition. It’s a fraying marriage held together by mutual benefit, but barely. Stakes: A real split could upend the entire enterprise AI ecosystem and open the door for rivals like Google, Meta, or Anthropic to swoop in. This relationship could end with another courtroom clash. It’s the quietest war but maybe the most cutthroat. Meta has made AI its top priority for 2025 and Zuckerberg is going straight for Altman’s team. In recent months, Meta has offered $100 million and more in signing bonuses to OpenAI researchers in a bid to poach top talent, Altman says. So far, most have stayed loyal to Altman. But the scale of the offers has shocked the Valley. In a podcast with his brother, Altman didn’t mince words: "They started making these, like, giant offers to a lot of people on our team, you know, like $100 million signing bonuses,†Altman said, adding:â€It is crazy.†He accused Meta of “just trying to copy OpenAI, down to the UI mistakes." Zuckerberg’s strategy is familiar. Outspend, out-recruit, outlast. Meta’s AI tools are still basic compared to ChatGPT, but with enough hires and acquisitions (like rumored talks with voice-AI startup PlayAI), Meta hopes to leapfrog the field. Stakes: Zuckerberg is fighting not just for dominance in AI, but for relevance. If Meta fails to catch up, it could be left behind in a world where AI, not social media, is the next major computing platform. The AI race has become a war of personalities. Altman, the techno-missionary. Musk, the chaos capitalist. Zuckerberg, the empire builder. Each believes they are the only one who can lead humanity into the next era of intelligence. What’s unfolding is a battle for the infrastructure of the 21st century: who owns the models, who trains the machines, and who gets to decide what AI thinks. And if the lawsuits, subpoenas, and poaching wars are any indication, they’re willing to burn billions to win.

OpenAI Reportedly Shuts Down for a Week as Zuck Poaches Its Top Talent

An employee's public lament over poached colleagues and a company-wide shutdown reveal a difficult truth: the human cost of building AI is reaching a breaking point. The war for artificial intelligence is getting personal. In recent days, after multiple OpenAI researchers left the company for Meta, one remaining employee publicly broke down. "Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are," Cheng Lu, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI, posted on X on June 29, commenting on a post announcing that Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or "Zuck," had poached four elite Chinese researchers. He continued: "Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn't keep them." The post, which was later deleted, quickly went viral. It revealed something Silicon Valley prefers to keep hidden: the emotional and psychological cost of building the so-called future of intelligence. This raw display of employee grief comes as WIRED reports that OpenAI is shutting down for the entire week, forcing its staff to rest and recharge after a relentless push toward creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Internally, it’s being framed as a much-needed break. But for a company locked in a brutal talent war, this mandatory vacation feels less like a wellness initiative and more like a panic button. The narrative of a looming burnout crisis has been quietly building for months. The mission to build a god-like intelligence is not a standard nine to five job. Reports from within the industry describe grueling, 80-hour workweeks as the baseline for researchers at top AI labs. This work has become a crusade, demanding total devotion from its acolytes. For years, the promise of achieving AGI, a technology that could solve all of humanity’s problems, was enough to fuel this sacrifice. The mission itself was the compensation. But now, that faith is being tested. The catalyst for this apparent crisis is Meta. While OpenAI engineers are tweeting like they've lost loved ones, Zuckerberg is reportedly assembling a new elite AI team, stocked with former OpenAI and Google DeepMind talent. It’s a quiet, methodical power play that may eventually tilt the AI landscape in his favor, especially if OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, keeps bleeding expertise. This is what the “AI revolution†actually looks like in 2025. Not just lines of code and chatbot demos, but emotional breakdowns, brain drain, and billionaires treating research labs like fantasy football teams. OpenAI’s burnout problem isn't new, but it is becoming harder to hide. The company has weathered multiple executive departures over the past two years, including the dramatic and brief firing of CEO Sam Altman, a crisis that exposed persistent internal tensions over safety, speed, and power. Now, with top researchers defecting and others visibly shaken, the company’s decision to pause for a wellness week feels less like a perk and more like damage control. Is OpenAI trying to fix a deep-seated culture problem with a one-week band-aid? By forcing everyone to log off simultaneously, they may be attempting to short circuit the poaching pipeline, preventing recruiters from picking off exhausted and isolated employees one by one. It’s an attempt to stanch the bleeding. The situation exposes the fundamental tension at the heart of the AGI pursuit. Building God is an expensive and exhausting business. For the first time, we are seeing the very real human cost of this technological arms race. The question for OpenAI is whether a week off is enough to convince its brilliant, burnt-out employees that the mission is still worth more than the money. For the rest of us, it’s a sign that even at the world’s most ambitious company, the cult of world-changing technology is beginning to show its cracks. For all the headlines about AI taking over the world, what we’re seeing at OpenAI is profoundly human. Exhaustion. Grief. Uncertainty. Even the best engineers in the most powerful labs are reaching their limits. And the companies pushing hardest to “change everything†are, ironically, the ones most visibly fraying under the weight of their own hype. For AI skeptics, this moment is revealing. Not because it proves AI isn’t important, but because it shows how fragile the infrastructure truly is. Not the servers or the models, but the people. The human brains behind the artificial ones. If OpenAI is the future, then the future is crying on its timeline and taking a mandatory mental health week. And if Meta wins the race, it may be because it remained just cold and ruthless enough to avoid all that.

Mark Zuckerberg Already Knows Your Life. Now He Wants His AI to Run It

In a sweeping new plan, the Meta CEO is assembling an AI "Avengers team" to build not just a better chatbot, but a personalized intelligence that anticipates your needs, manages your schedule, and guides your decisions. Welcome to Life-as-a-Service. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t just want Meta to lead in the field of artificial intelligence. He wants to build the AI that leads you. In a memo to employees viewed by Gizmodo on June 30, the Meta CEO announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a major reorganization of the company’s AI efforts under a single, ambitious goal: delivering personal superintelligence to everyone. Forget chatbots. Zuckerberg’s vision is much grander. He is betting that within a few years, AI will not just be answering your questions or writing your emails. It will be managing your schedule, anticipating your needs, running your home, helping you make decisions, and maybe even guiding your career. Call it Life-as-a-Service, powered by Meta. “As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,†Zuckerberg wrote. “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.†The move is seen as a direct challenge to competitors. "The launch of Meta Superintelligence labs isn't just an announcement; it's a statement: Meta won't settle for second place in AI," commented Alon Yamin, cofounder and CEO of the plagiarism detection platform Copyleaks. He added, "Meta and Mark clearly see this as a make or break moment for AI leadership." Bloomberg reported on the memo earlier Monday. A Meta spokesperson has since confirmed its contents to Gizmodo. To make this happen, Zuckerberg is assembling a kind of AI Avengers team. The new hires represent a major talent coup: These are power hires, people with reputations for building fast and thinking years ahead of the market. Zuckerberg says more big names are on the way. Meta already has a strong foundation with Llama, its open source family of large language models. The latest versions are now powering Meta AI, which the company claims reaches over 1 billion monthly users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But that was just phase one. Zuckerberg now wants to build a new generation of models capable of what insiders call frontier performance. In simple terms, this means AI that can reason, plan, adapt, and act with little to no human instruction. If successful, this would not just make Meta competitive with OpenAI or Google DeepMind; it would make Meta the home of the world’s first truly general purpose personal intelligence. This is the kind of AI that doesn’t just answer your questions. It runs your life. Meta isn’t starting from scratch. Through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the company already knows more about you than most of your friends do. It has spent the last 15 years quietly building a behavioral map of billions of people, tracking who you talk to, what you look at, what you say, and what you buy. That treasure trove of intimate data is now fuel for the next phase: an AI that not only serves you but knows you deeply enough to run your life better than you can. In tech speak, Zuckerberg’s vision is for “agentic AI,†or AI that can take actions on your behalf. Imagine an always on, infinitely capable, personalized intelligence that lives on your phone, in your glasses, and across all your devices. Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver this mass market personal AI brain. Unlike smaller labs, it has a global user base of billions, access to more behavioral data than almost any company on Earth, and massive computing infrastructure. And with Zuckerberg’s controlling shares, there are no shareholders to slow things down. But this also raises urgent questions. Who controls this intelligence? What will it prioritize? What happens when a machine knows your desires better than you do, and that machine works for a corporation? Zuckerberg believes Meta can be trusted to build and deliver superintelligence to the masses. But the next chapter in AI will not be about clever apps or productivity hacks. It will be a battle over who gets to program the brain that programs you.

Meta restructures AI unit under 'Superintelligence Labs' in bold move

It's no secret that Meta is out hunting and poaching the top AI talent to build their vision. The tech giants recently struck a 14.3 billion dollar deal with Scale AI and onboarded their former CEO Alexandr Wang, who now happens to be Meta's first-ever Chief AI Officer. Also, this decision may not have gone well with the company's long-serving AI scientists, but Zuckerberg has shown full faith in the 28-year-old. He noted in his memo that he and Wang had worked together for several years and said "I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation." On the table, Wang is joined by Nat Friedman, the ex-Github CEO and investor, who'll jointly help steer the ship of Superintelligence Labs to reach its goals. And, the hiring spree doesn't just end there. Meta is already offering $100 million compensation offers, allegedly for recruiting talent from competitors like OpenAI. Zuckerberg also mentioned eleven researchers who had joined Meta from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Google DeepMind principal researcher Pei Sun and Anthropic engineer Joel Pobar are amongst the mentioned members on this list.

Meta's new 'Superintelligence' team could upend the entire AI industry -- here's why OpenAI should be worried

Mark Zuckerberg is no longer content playing catch-up in the AI space, especially with Meta's biggest rival, ChatGPT's OpenAI. The proof is in his recent hiring spree that's poached top researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Claude's Anthropic to form Meta's new "Superintelligence" team. In an internal memo first reported by Wired, Zuckerberg welcomed more than a dozen elite AI scientists into Meta's newly branded Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). The move signals a bold shift that Meta is going after artificial general intelligence (AGI), and it's doing it with financial force. Among Meta's new recruits are multiple former OpenAI researchers, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren. They're joined by several big names from Google and DeepMind such as Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai; all known for their work on high-performing multimodal models and model alignment. Zuckerberg is assembling full research groups and giving them the infrastructure (and budget) to go big. According to multiple reports, some of the hires were lured by seven- to nine-figure pay packages and direct pitches from Zuckerberg himself. Meta also tapped Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, and Daniel Gross, an AI-focused investor, to co-lead the applied AI arm of MSL. The mix of pure research firepower and product-ready AI talent is the balance Meta will need if it wants to scale cutting-edge models into tools consumers actually want to use (like ChatGPT has proven to be). Until now, Meta has largely stayed in the background of the AI arms race, focusing on open-source LLMs like Llama while OpenAI and Anthropic dominated the spotlight with ChatGPT and Claude. But with this high-profile hiring spree, Meta is making one thing clear: it wants to lead AI developmen, not be in the shadows anymore. This escalation has several major implications: Losing talent to a direct competitor hurts, and OpenAI reportedly isn't happy about it. After several team members jumped to Meta, OpenAI's Chief Scientist, Jukan Choi described the exodus as feeling like "someone broke into our house." With multiple researchers leaving in a short window, including from OpenAI's Zurich office, it's clear that Meta's offers are lucrative but also strategically timed and targeted. What does this mean for the launch of ChatGPT-5? We don't know exactly, but my guess is that the much-anticipated chatbot could be delayed due to the loss of much of OpenAI's top talent. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is no longer a distant goal for Meta. Zuckerberg now publicly says Meta is working toward it, and with this new team, it's building the talent to match. Meta is investing in long-context reasoning, multi-modal learning, alignment research and inference optimization -- the very same pillars that OpenAI and DeepMind prioritize. Meta has something most companies don't: access to billions of users and massive compute infrastructure. Pairing world-class AI talent with Meta's scale, plus its reach across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Ray-Bans, could rapidly close the gap. Beyond a shockingly significant hiring spree, Zuckerberg's move is a signal that Meta wants to win the AI race. With top-tier researchers, aggressive investment and an infrastructure built for global rollout, Zuckerberg is making Meta a serious contender in the race for AI dominance. Whether this results in smarter chatbots, better wearable AI or the first real steps toward AGI, one thing is clear: the balance of power in AI is shifting, almost as fast as AI is evolving.

Mark Zuckerberg's secret list of top AI talent to poach has tech world atwitter

Meta CEO reportedly to offer pay packages worth up to $100m, a gambit OpenAI's Sam Altman calls 'crazy' Mark Zuckerberg reportedly spent months putting together a list of the top AI engineers and researchers across the globe, preparing to offer potential recruits lucrative compensation packages in Meta's attempt to poach AI talent from key competitors. Silicon Valley has been talking for weeks about the Meta CEO's quest to attract top AI talent, including by offering pay packages worth up to $100m. Zuckerberg has personally reached out to desired candidates, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been competing in the search for AI dominance with rivals like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which have invested billions of dollars into AI research and product development. Last month, questions were raised about the direction of Meta's AI development after it delayed the scheduled rollout of Behemoth, its flagship AI model. Earlier this month, Meta paid $14bn for a stake in Scale AI and is putting its founder, 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, in charge of its "superintelligence team" - an internal lab that would focus on Meta's efforts to develop a hypothetical AI system that is smarter than humans. Last year, Google bought out the shareholders in Character.AI, a chatbot service that allows users to have personal conversations with different AI personas, for $2.7bn. People on "the list", as Zuckerberg's slate is known around Silicon Valley, include recent graduates from top PhD programs at schools like the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. Many are currently employed by Meta's AI competitors, including OpenAI and Google's DeepMind project, and have traded notes with each other on Meta's recruiting efforts. A recruit who has personally spoken to Zuckerberg said that his goal appears to be a "transfusion from the country's top AI labs". A WhatsApp group chat called "Recruiting Party" was formed for Zuckerberg and at least two other senior Meta executives to talk through potential hires. The Meta CEO has been trying to personally find candidates by looking through research papers, according to the Wall Street Journal. Zuckerberg's hands-on recruiting efforts have drawn the ire of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who called the rumored signing bonuses and compensation packages on offer "crazy". "I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," Altman said during an appearance on the Uncapped podcast, which is hosted by his brother Jack. "I think the strategy of a ton of upfront, guaranteed comp, and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don't think that's going to set up a great culture."

Meta poaching talent from OpenAI hits meme status

Zuckerberg's aggressive recruiting for Meta AI has the internet's attention. Credit: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images Talent poaching doesn't often go viral, but this story has all the right ingredients: Meta, OpenAI, and $100 million signing bonuses. Meta has been aggressively pursuing AI talent from top labs, mostly OpenAI, in an effort to get a leg up on its competition. The details of the developing story are so dramatic and foreign to the rest of the world that it's become stranger-than-fiction fodder for the internet watching it unfold in real time. In case you haven't been following the saga, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is frustrated with his company's progress in the quest for AI supremacy. Earlier this month, reports surfaced of Zuckerberg personally recruiting talent for a superintelligence group to accelerate Meta's AI research and development efforts. This included snagging Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the team, which seemed to have stung OpenAI particularly badly, since it has had a longstanding partnership with Scale AI. OpenAI (and Google) reportedly cut ties with Scale AI after the Meta acquihire. Meta's AI recruitment also included enticing OpenAI researchers with $100 million signing bonuses, according to CEO Sam Altman on a podcast interview with his brother, Jack Altman. Sam didn't seem phased: "I'm really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take [Meta] up on that." Then, Altman and OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap took the offensive during a live show of the New York Times podcast, Hard Fork -- the two execs were asked if they think Zuckerberg actually believes in superintelligence or whether he's just saying that as a recruiting tactic, with Lightcap responding, "I think [Zuckerberg] believes he's super intelligent." Days later, the Wall Street Journal would report that Meta had successfully poached three OpenAI staffers from its Zurich office. Up until this point, Zuckerberg and Altman have had a Real Housewives kind of rivalry, or should we say Zuckerberg has a rivalry with Altman, who has publicly regarded the whole thing as kind of a joke. When it was reported that Meta was planning to develop a standalone app to compete with ChatGPT, Altman cheekily responded by posting, "ok fine maybe we'll do a social app." From the outside, it's all very high school. But that was then. This week, things looked different for OpenAI. On Monday, an internal memo from Zuckerberg reported by Bloomberg revealed the scope of Meta's aggressive recruiting tactics. Based on the memo, Meta has gained 11 hires for his superintelligence team from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, including four employees from OpenAI. An internal memo from within OpenAI (via Wired) painted a picture of a company in crisis. Chief Research Officer Mark Chen told staffers that the executive team was "working around the clock to talk to those with offers," and trying to retain talent. "[W]e've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent," added Chen. The situation is so intense that OpenAI is reportedly giving employees next week off to recharge from the grueling workload and pace, while leadership tries to get things under control. While two billionaire CEOs battle for top talent with outrageous financial incentives, the internet is doing its thing. To put things in perspective, soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo was paid 80 million pounds to sign with Real Madrid in 2009, the largest transfer deal ever at the time. Posters on X compared that amount to Altman's claims of $100 million signing bonuses for his former AI staffers heading to Meta (one of the new Meta employees publicly disputes that number). This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Even if $100 million is an overstatement, the tech industry is looking more and more like the professional sports world to many. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Others on Twitter are gobsmacked at the very lucrative AI brain race. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. ...and the rumors of Zuckerberg's intense and expensive efforts at bringing the brightest AI minds to Menlo Park. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Mark Zuckerberg goes all-in on AI and might even beat Sam Altman and OpenAI to superintelligence

New hires from OpenAI will form the team headed up by Alexandr Wang from Scale AI Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has heated up the race towards AI superintelligence by restructuring the company's artificial intelligence division with the main aim being to develop artificial superintelligence, that is, intelligence that is far beyond what humans are capable of. Superintelligence could mean exponential leaps in medicine, science, and technology that dramatically change the course of humanity, but it doesn't come without risks. In an memo to employees, Zuckerberg said he is creating a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, lead by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, which Meta has recently acquired for $14.3 billion. As reported by Bloomberg, the memo sent by Zuckerberg reads: "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. 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." The memo goes on to list 11 recent hires to the new division, which include ex-employees of OpenAI who worked on the last 12 months of OpenAI products, along with employees from Anthropic and Google. The list includes Trapit Bansal, who pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI, Shuchao Bi, co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini, and Huiwen Chang, co-creator of GPT-4o's image generation, who previously invented MaskIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, has repeatedly posted about achieving superintelligence being the goal for his company on his blog. As recently as June, he wrote, "We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it's much less weird than it seems like it should be." However, it appears that Zuckerberg wants Meta to be the company that first claims to have achieved superintelligence, and he is certainly throwing an awful lot of money at this project, which has led some to question whether this is really the right approach and if achieving superintelligence is even possible. Mark Zuckerberg paid $14.3 billion for Scale AI just to hire Alexandr Wang, and has even been offering OpenAI employees $100 million to join Meta, according to a report in the New York Times. Zuckerberg's new push towards superintelligence comes after Meta's own Chief AI Scientist, Yann Le Cun, talking about superintelligence said publicly last month that "It's not going to happen within the next two years, there is no way in hell", and cast doubt upon the whole idea of scaling up existing LLM models, like Meta AI or ChatGPT, to achieve superintelligence, which is the approach that companies like OpenAI seem to be following. Meta AI is currently available inside all the Meta social media apps, like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and can also be used within the new Meta AI app.

OpenAI exec reacts to Meta's billion-dollar poaching spree

Meta just pulled off a high-profile heist in Silicon Valley's AI arms race -- and OpenAI isn't taking it lightly. Over the past week, Meta recruited four senior OpenAI researchers to join its newly formed "superintelligence lab" -- and their departures (following earlier departures) prompted OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen to sound the alarm internally over the weekend. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote in a staff-wide Slack message obtained by Wired. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." The memo signals just how seriously OpenAI is treating Meta's talent grab -- and how personal things have become. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been reaching out directly to OpenAI employees with aggressive offers, including signing bonuses and first-year compensation packages rumored to be as high as $100 million, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Some Meta-linked researchers have publicly disputed the rumored compensation figures -- calling them "fake news" -- but Meta hasn't denied that big checks are being written. Still, the messaging war continues: Altman has framed Meta as pushing a short‑term compensation play over long‑term innovation culture. Meanwhile, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has defended the company's approach, acknowledging such scarce talent "commands a significant market premium." Inside OpenAI, leaders are scrambling to hold the line. Chen said that he's been working with Altman "around the clock" to talk to employees considering Meta offers and that the company is "recalibrating comp" and rolling out ways to recognize top talent. That includes personalized retention efforts, last-minute counteroffers, and what Chen described as "creative" reward strategies. Zuckerberg's "superintelligence" lab -- an AI research group focused on building artificial general intelligence -- has become a high-priority project at Meta as the company looks to catch up to OpenAI's lead and jockeys for pole position in a crowded AI field. Internally, Meta's group is said to include roughly 50 top researchers, with new hires coming from not just OpenAI but also Google's DeepMind, Anthropic, and Scale AI. According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg has been personally involved in the recruitment push (inviting top talent to his homes and creating a "Recruiting Party" group chat with other Meta execs). Meta is reportedly in talks for a $10 billion-plus investment in Scale AI -- a data platform company that helps companies train models -- and the company will likely play a big role in Zuckerberg's plans. Alexandr Wang, the company's founder and CEO (and former housemate of Altman), has been tapped to join Meta's venture, and the investment deal is poised to bring other Scale AI employees to Meta. Sources told The New York Times that Meta's AI lab is part of a larger reorganization effort and comes at a time when Zuckerberg has been frustrated by failing product releases, such as Llama 4, which has been questioned both internally and externally by developers. Despite Zuckerberg's claims that Meta's Llama model worked as well as (or better than) models from industry leaders, researchers largely decided that Meta's model was designed to look more advanced than it actually was. The timing of Meta's raid of top talent wasn't lost on OpenAI, which is entering a company-wide "recharge" week to give its staff a break. "Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and will take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation," one OpenAI leader warned, according to Chen's memo. Staff were encouraged to reach out if contacted by Meta -- and were told that "ridiculous exploding offers" don't need to be accepted on the spot. OpenAI is now trying to shift focus back to its broader mission. "Skirmishes with Meta are the side quest," Chen wrote. "We need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to compute (a lot more supercomputers are coming online later this year) into intelligence." But with Zuckerberg aggressively poaching from the company that helped define this AI era, the line between side quest and main storyline is getting blurrier by the day.

Meta stock pops as Mark Zuckerberg poaches new recruits from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google

Meta stock hit an all-time high on Monday following the news that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had recruited an all-star Superintelligence team that includes key architects of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and its image-gen tech. The company's stock peaked at $747.90 during Monday trading, beating Meta's previous record set in February this year. Shares closed Monday at a record $738.09, marking a 23% year-to-date gain. Investors cheered the company's aggressive push into AI and its hiring spree of talent from major rivals in the space, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Meta's new Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang posted the list of new recruits on X. Wang recently joined the company as part of a deal that saw Meta investing up to $15 billion for a 49% stake in his training data company, ScaleAI. Zuckerberg reportedly told staff that former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the group with Wang. "I'm excited to be the Chief AI Officer, working alongside [Nat Friedman]," he wrote in a post. "We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I'm excited to share as well." The team includes several prominent former OpenAI researchers, including: Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune, made outside normal working hours. Zuckerberg has reportedly been personally recruiting for Meta's new 50-person "Superintelligence" AI team, reportedly offering $100m signing bonuses to woo top OpenAI researchers, according to CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI is reportedly scrambling to contain the fallout after a wave of high-profile researcher departures to Meta, with Chief Research Officer Mark Chen likening the exodus to a home invasion. In a memo obtained by Wired, Chen told employees that OpenAI's leadership team, including Altman, had been working "around the clock" to retain the company's top talent, urgently recalibrating compensation and seeking "creative" ways to reward top performers. While Altman publicly complained about rumored $100 million signing bonuses, Meta has internally disputed the figure. In a recent all-hands meeting shared with The Verge, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said the actual offers Meta was making were more complicated and implied that only a few very senior people may have been offered that kind of money. He clarified that "the actual terms of the offer" weren't just "sign-on bonus" but rather "all these different things."

Meta spending big on AI talent but will it pay off?

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are spending billions of dollars for top talent to make up ground in the generative artificial intelligence race, sparking doubt about the wisdom of the spree. OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently lamented that Meta has offered $100 million bonuses to engineers who jump to Zuckerberg's ship, where hefty salaries await. A few OpenAI employees have reportedly taken Meta up on the offer, joining Scale AI founder and former chief executive Alexandr Wang at the Menlo Park-based tech titan. Meta paid more than $14 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI in mid-June, bringing Wang on board as part of the deal. Scale AI labels data to better train AI models for businesses, governments and labs. "Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI," a Meta spokesperson told AFP. "As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts." US media outlets have reported that Meta's recruitment effort has also targeted OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever; Google rival Perplexity AI, and hot AI video startup Runway. Meta chief Zuckerberg is reported to have sounded the charge himself due to worries Meta is lagging rivals in the generative AI race. The latest version of Meta AI model Llama finished behind its heavyweight rivals in code writing rankings at an LM Arena platform that lets users evaluate the technology. Meta is integrating recruits into a new team dedicated to developing "superintelligence," or AI that outperforms people when it comes to thinking and understanding. 'Mercenary' Tech blogger Zvi Moshowitz felt Zuckerberg had to do something about the situation, expecting Meta to succeed in attracting hot talent but questioning how well it will pay off. "There are some extreme downsides to going pure mercenary... and being a company with products no one wants to work on," Moshowitz told AFP. "I don't expect it to work, but I suppose Llama will suck less." While Meta's share price is nearing a new high with the overall value of the company approaching $2 trillion, some investors have started to worry. Institutional investors are concerned about how well Meta is managing its cash flow and reserves, according to Baird strategist Ted Mortonson. "Right now, there are no checks and balances" with Zuckerberg free to do as he wishes running Meta, Mortonson noted. The potential for Meta to cash in by using AI to rev its lucrative online advertising machine has strong appeal but "people have a real big concern about spending," said Mortonson. Meta executives have laid out a vision of using AI to streamline the ad process from easy creation to smarter targeting, bypassing creative agencies and providing a turnkey solution to brands. AI talent hires are a long-term investment unlikely to impact Meta's profitability in the immediate future, according to CFRA analyst Angelo Zino. "But still, you need those people on board now and to invest aggressively to be ready for that phase" of generative AI, Zino said. According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg is considering shifting away from Meta's Llama, perhaps even using competing AI models instead. Penn State University professor Mehmet Canayaz sees potential for Meta to succeed with AI agents tailored to specific tasks at its platform, not requiring the best large language model. "Even firms without the most advanced LLMs, like Meta, can succeed as long as their models perform well within their specific market segment," Canayaz said.

Mark Zuckerberg overhauled Meta's entire AI org in a risky, multi-billion dollar bet on 'superintelligence'

Mark Zuckerberg is stacking the deck in the AI race, betting that unlimited capital, top talent, and raw computing power will ensure victory. If the winning hand Zuckerberg is chasing -- AI "superintelligence" -- is still very much a vague and theoretical concept, the Meta CEO's remarkable series of moves unveiled Monday instantly changed the reality for everyone else in the game, particularly the pioneering AI startups without Meta's resources. Zuckerberg announced a major revamp of its AI operations on Monday, putting the company's collection of AI businesses and projects under the umbrella of a newly created organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, and appointing Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, as Meta's first ever Chief AI Officer. "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo obtained by Fortune. "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." He added that the details he would share were about building towards a company vision of 'personal superintelligence for everyone." The new superintelligence lab, Zuckerberg wrote, "includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models." He also confirmed that former GitHub CEO and investor Nat Friedman has also joined Meta to partner with Wang to lead MSL, heading Meta's work on AI products and applied research. "Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do," Zuckerberg wrote. Fortune reported last week that Friedman is also connected with Wang and Scale - he is a longtime and active Scale investor and co-hosted the secretive Scale AI Security Summit in Utah in November 2023. Meta has embarked on an extraordinary hiring spree in recent weeks, bringing Wang on board as part of a $14.3 billion deal with Scale, and recruiting top researchers from OpenAI with rumored $100 million compensation offers. In Zuckerberg's internal memo on Monday, he named eleven top researchers who had joined Meta from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. For OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI craze with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Meta's aggressive hiring spree represents a critical threat. OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen described the situation as feeling like someone "breaking into our home," calling the talent loss "theft." OpenAI said it had begun recalibrating compensation and crafting "creative" retention packages to stay competitive. While OpenAI has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, the relationship between the two companies has reportedly grown strained over the past year. As Meta increasingly seeks to move into OpenAI's territory however, the Sam Altman led startup may need to find allies with deep pockets. OpenAI recently began using AI chips made by Google, according to media reports, signaling a growing bond between the two companies, even though Google's Gemini LLMs compete directly with OpenAI. With an internet advertising business that generates more than $40 billion every quarter, Meta can afford to bankroll a no-holds-barred AI batter even it doesn't immediately deliver a profit. In making Wang chief AI officer, Meta has chosen someone who is not a computer scientist to lead all of its AI efforts -- a choice that may not go over well with Meta's deep bench of AI scientists and PhDs, many of whom have already decamped. Zuckerberg noted in his memo that he and Wang had worked together for several years and said "I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation." There is also no agreed-upon formal definition of 'superintelligence,' though it is typically refers to an intelligence that vastly surpasses human capabilities in virtually all domains, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills -- exceeding human cognition across the board. Superintelligence is generally perceived as going beyond artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which, though also vague, typically refers to an AI system with human-level intelligence across a wide range of work-related tasks. That is, it can reason, plan, solve problems, understand language, and learn in a generalizable way, much like a human. Zuckerberg claimed that Meta is "uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world," pointing to its efforts to build out data centers supporting more computing power than smaller labs - it is currently spending tens of billions on data centers and is raising more. The Financial Times reported last week that Meta is seeking $29 billion from private capital firms for its all-in push to build AI data centers. Of course, Microsoft and Google are also spending tens of billions of dollars in cap ex to build out their AI infrastructure. And OpenAI has said it intends to invest $500 billion with partners including Softbank in the coming years to build out its Stargate network of AI datacenters. If the race to Superintelligence is a test of wills and capital, Zuckerberg seems to be betting that he can outlast the competition.

Meta restructures AI teams to focus on superintelligence

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says humanity is on the cusp of "the beginning of a new era" as he commits the company to building AI superintelligence -- systems that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans. In an internal memo sent Monday and published by CNBC, Zuckerberg announced the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a new group that will house all of Meta's AI efforts, including its foundational model development, products, and research. The move underscores how central artificial intelligence has become to Meta's strategy as it competes with OpenAI and Google to build next-generation AI models and assistants. "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote. "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." Leading MSL will be Alexandr Wang, founder of data-labeling startup Scale AI, whom Zuckerberg called "the most impressive founder of his generation." Wang joins Meta as Chief AI Officer following Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier this month. Wang will partner with Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, who will oversee Meta's AI products and applied research. The restructured group will also include a star roster of recent hires poached from top AI labs, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. Among them are Jack Rae, former pre-training tech lead for Google's Gemini; Shuchao Bi, co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode; and Pei Sun, who built perception models for Waymo before working on Gemini at DeepMind. Zuckerberg wrote that Meta is committed to pushing forward with its upcoming models Llama 4.1 and 4.2, which already power Meta AI across its apps with over a billion monthly active users. But he added that the company is now starting research on "the next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so." The memo comes amid intensifying competition among tech giants for AI talent, with Meta offering signing bonuses reportedly as high as $100 million. Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth recently told CNBC that OpenAI has been countering its offers, underscoring the "unprecedented" market for AI researchers today. Zuckerberg said Meta's scale, resources, and ability to build products used by billions give it a unique advantage in delivering superintelligence to the public. "I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone," he wrote. Whether superintelligence proves to be the beginning of a new era or just the next chapter in tech's AI arms race, Zuckerberg is betting Meta's future on being first across the line.

Mark Zuckerberg has a literal list of AI all-stars to whom he's offering fantastic sums of money. An expert explains why he's hiring so aggressively

In an internal memo, Mark Zuckerberg revealed 11 members of his new AI SuperIntelligence Lab that he poached from OpenAI and other tech giants. The memo, obtained by CNBC and published Monday, lists top engineers and researchers hired to bolster Meta's AI efforts. It comes months after Zuckerberg began his personal AI talent crusade -- one that has blindsided competitors and sparked reports of "The List," a compilation of the Facebook founder's recruits he hopes will staff the Meta Superintelligence Lab. The document names five ex-OpenAI staff that left the company just weeks after The OpenAI Files report discussed deep leadership concerns. Zuckerberg has been personally reaching out to potential recruits, The Wall Street Journal reported. In his pitch to OpenAI staffers, the Meta CEO offered a $100 million signing bonus and one year compensation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast hosted by his brother, Jack. The lucrative, professional athlete-like job offers come after Meta's latest AI model, Llama 4, received a cool reaction from consumers and critics. Experts say Zuckerberg's moves might be a sign of desperation to keep up with competitors. "Last time mMeta released an AI model, it wasn't as successful as they expected," Edgar Perez, an corporate trainer on AI and other cutting-edge technologies, told Fortune. Zuckerberg has made good on his promise to bolster Meta's AI efforts in recent months, hiring Scale AI's ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to help lead the Superintelligence team he's assembling. Perez said the next challenge for Meta is to make AI reasoning models that can contend with products like DeepSeek's R1, Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and OpenAI's o1 series. "At the end of the day, what Mark Zuckerberg wants to incorporate in Meta is AI agents," Perez said. "To be able to be successful, [the AI agent] needs to reason. Let's say, if you want to develop a task in a company, or if a customer would like to do some task through Meta, they need to decompose a number of steps. And those steps will need to be managed through a reasoning model. That's not something that Llama, at the moment, can do, and that's why they need to refine." But, even with the allure of a nine-figure salary, Perez said Zuckerberg's offer may still be hard to swallow for someone working at a place with a strong company culture. "What happens when somebody quits [the Superintelligence team]?" Perez said. "Let's say, in a week: Will they return the bonuses? ... Having that type of money, people might just decide to stay for a year or two and then leave and start their own companies later." Even before Zuckerberg's memo, the Meta chief's aggressive talent recruitment strategies have appeared to irk OpenAI's leadership. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, wrote in an internal memo obtained and published by Wired on Saturday. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." Chen told employees he was working with Altman and other leaders at the company "around the clock to talk to those with offers," adding, "we've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent." Though Chen wrote he would fight to retain all of OpenAI's talent, he "won't do so at the price of fairness to others." With the announcement of a new organization within Meta, experts question if Zuckerberg's personnel investments will turn a profit in the end, or if it will lead to more AI-generated woes. In a post on LinkedIn, Vineet Agrawal, an investor in health-tech startups, called Zuckerberg's hiring spree "desperate." "When you're winning with vision, you don't need to win with money," he wrote. "Real talent follows challenge and purpose. The moment someone chooses you purely for $100 million, they'll leave you for $101 million."

Key takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg's memo on Meta's new "Superintelligence" AI drive and big hires

What follows is the full-text as Zuckerberg's memo, which was obtained by Fortune reporter Sharon Goldman: As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. 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. Today I want to share some details about how we're organizing our AI efforts to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone. We're going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models. Alexandr Wang has joined Meta to serve as our Chief AI Officer and lead MSL. Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence, and as co-founder and CEO he built ScaleAI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of almost all leading models across the industry. Nat Friedman has also joined Meta to partner with Alex to lead MSL, heading our work on AI products and applied research. Nat will work with Connor to define his role going forward. He ran GitHub at Microsoft, and most recently has run one of the leading AI investment firms. Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do. We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I'm excited to share as well: I'm excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2. These models power Meta AI, which is used by more than 1 billion monthly actives across our apps and an increasing number of agents across Meta that help improve our products and technology. We're committed to continuing to build out these models. In parallel, we're going to start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort. We're still forming this group and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well. Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world. We have a strong business that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs. We have deeper experience building and growing products that reach billions of people. We are pioneering and leading the AI glasses and wearables category that is growing very quickly. And our company structure allows us to move with vastly greater conviction and boldness. I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone. We have even more great people at all levels joining this effort in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. I'm excited to dive in and get to work. ***

Mark Zuckerberg Unveils New Meta AI Lab After Poaching OpenAI Talent - Decrypt

Meta's actions had led OpenAI to consider how it can "recalibrate compensation." The war for artificial intelligence supremacy is no longer fought in code alone; it's now a fight over talent, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just pulled off a major heist, poaching talent from rivals OpenAI and Google. Zuckerberg revealed the new AI researcher dream team today, which he called the Meta Superintelligence Labs. Many of the new team members were lured away from rival firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC. The team is led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta's Chief AI Officer. He co-leads the division with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who oversees AI product development and applied research. "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote. "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's aggressive recruitment of AI researchers from rival firms has sparked outrage at OpenAI, prompting an internal memo from OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, who described the poaching as akin to someone "breaking into our home and stealing something," according to a report by Wired. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." To that end, the company reportedly gave OpenAI employees the week off to recover from the frenzy of rumors surrounding the talent war. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously claimed that Meta had been luring his top scientists via $100 million signing bonuses -- a figure Meta disputes. The fallout became public last week, when OpenAI confirmed that researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai had left the company. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta hired all three scientists, who had previously worked together at Google DeepMind. OpenAI is now working to prevent further departures. Chen said the company is "recalibrating compensation" and collaborating with leadership "around the clock" to retain employees. He also accused Meta of stoking a fear of missing out by offering "exploding" bonuses that require quick decisions. Chen encouraged staff to reach out for support if they felt pressured by recruiters during a scheduled companywide "recharge" week. Zuckerberg's memo today says that Meta is consolidating its AI efforts under the MSL umbrella, bringing together its foundational model teams, product applications, the FAIR research group, and a new lab focused on developing next-generation AI models. "I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort," Zuckerberg wrote. "We're still forming this group, and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well." "I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone," he added. Still, Chen tried to reframe the battle as a distraction. "The skirmishes with Meta are the side quest," he wrote. "The real prize is general intelligence." But if the battle is a side quest, it could redraw the map. The best minds in AI are no longer tethered to ideology or loyalty -- they're following the money, the compute, and increasingly, the chance to define the future. Meta's new team includes Daniel Gross, co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI); former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun; and several high-profile AI researchers from OpenAI, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren, as well as Joel Pobar, an Anthropic engineer and Meta veteran, and Google Fellow, Johan Schalkwyk. Meta's stock rose 0.47% on Monday following the news of its AI hiring blitz, trading at $736.83, according to MarketWatch data.

Meta spending big on AI talent but will it pay off?

New York (AFP) - Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are spending billions of dollars for top talent to make up ground in the generative artificial intelligence race, sparking doubt about the wisdom of the spree. OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently lamented that Meta has offered $100 million bonuses to engineers who jump to Zuckerberg's ship, where hefty salaries await. A few OpenAI employees have reportedly taken Meta up on the offer, joining Scale AI founder and former chief executive Alexandr Wang at the Menlo Park-based tech titan. Meta paid more than $14 billion for a 49 percent stake in Scale AI in mid-June, bringing Wang on board as part of the deal. Scale AI labels data to better train AI models for businesses, governments and labs. "Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI," a Meta spokesperson told AFP. "As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts." US media outlets have reported that Meta's recruitment effort has also targeted OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever; Google rival Perplexity AI, and hot AI video startup Runway. Meta chief Zuckerberg is reported to have sounded the charge himself due to worries Meta is lagging rivals in the generative AI race. The latest version of Meta AI model Llama finished behind its heavyweight rivals in code writing rankings at an LM Arena platform that lets users evaluate the technology. Meta is integrating recruits into a new team dedicated to developing "superintelligence," or AI that outperforms people when it comes to thinking and understanding. 'Mercenary' Tech blogger Zvi Moshowitz felt Zuckerberg had to do something about the situation, expecting Meta to succeed in attracting hot talent but questioning how well it will pay off. "There are some extreme downsides to going pure mercenary... and being a company with products no one wants to work on," Moshowitz told AFP. "I don't expect it to work, but I suppose Llama will suck less." While Meta's share price is nearing a new high with the overall value of the company approaching $2 trillion, some investors have started to worry. Institutional investors are concerned about how well Meta is managing its cash flow and reserves, according to Baird strategist Ted Mortonson. "Right now, there are no checks and balances" with Zuckerberg free to do as he wishes running Meta, Mortonson noted. The potential for Meta to cash in by using AI to rev its lucrative online advertising machine has strong appeal but "people have a real big concern about spending," said Mortonson. Meta executives have laid out a vision of using AI to streamline the ad process from easy creation to smarter targeting, bypassing creative agencies and providing a turnkey solution to brands. AI talent hires are a long-term investment unlikely to impact Meta's profitability in the immediate future, according to CFRA analyst Angelo Zino. "But still, you need those people on board now and to invest aggressively to be ready for that phase" of generative AI, Zino said. According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg is considering shifting away from Meta's Llama, perhaps even using competing AI models instead. Penn State University professor Mehmet Canayaz sees potential for Meta to succeed with AI agents tailored to specific tasks at its platform, not requiring the best large language model. "Even firms without the most advanced LLMs, like Meta, can succeed as long as their models perform well within their specific market segment," Canayaz said.

Meta announces new 'superintelligence' unit to work on AI

Meta announced a new division to create an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is as intelligent as humans. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, wrote in an internal memo on Monday that Meta Superintelligence Labs, MSL, will be a dedicated part of the company focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI). The memo said that MSL would house several research teams that are working on foundational AI models such as Llama software. It will be lead by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, an American data annotation company that builds training data sets for AI companies. Meta bought a 49 percent share in Scale AI last month for $14.3 billion (€12.4 billion), with the company saying at the time that it would employ Wang and a few other members of his team. Zuckerberg's memo included the names of several more people joining Meta from rivals OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Former OpenAI leaders Hongyu Ren, Jiahui Yu, Shengjia Zhao and researchers Trapit Bansal, Shuchao Bi, Huiwen Chang and Ji Lin are now being brought into Meta, Zuckerberg's internal memo added. Euronews Next contacted OpenAI to get their reaction to the news but did not receive an immediate reply. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently accused Meta of offering his employees $100 million (€87 million) signing bonuses if they joined his company. Altman told his brother Jack in his podcast at the time that he respects Meta's "aggression" in competing with the company but that promising "a ton of upfront guarnateed comp(ensation) ... [won't] set up a great culture". "I think people look at the two paths [OpenAI vs Meta] and they say OpenAI's got a really good shot, a much better shot on actually delivering on super intelligence and may eventually be the more valuable company," he said.

Meta Hires 3 OpenAI Researchers as Poaching Continues | AIM

According to WSJ, Meta is poaching OpenAI researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. Meta, the company behind the Llama family of open-source models, has 'poached' three OpenAI researchers to join its efforts to build superintelligent systems, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday. WSJ, citing sources familiar with the matter, revealed that Meta has hired three researchers -- Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. They were responsible for setting up OpenAI's office in Zurich, Switzerland, last year. If true, this would be yet another move by Meta to boost talent within its company, as it tries to catch up with the competition. Recently, Meta invested $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, an AI startup that helps enterprises develop their own AI models. Scale AI's CEO, Alexander Wang, stepped down from the role and will lead Meta's new 'superintelligence' team. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company also reportedly made an acquisition offer to Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. During its fundraising efforts, the startup was valued at around $32 billion. However, the offer was declined. The company is trying to hire SSI co-founder Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to strengthen its new AI division, which is headed by Wang. In a recent podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta offers extremely high compensation packages to OpenAI employees, including signing bonuses of up to $100 million. While pursuing some of the best talent in the industry has been a familiar pattern historically, the strategy seems more important than ever in today's AI-driven world. According to reports, Apple is also reportedly looking to acquire Perplexity AI to boost its AI capabilities on its devices, which Meta had also considered before investing in Scale AI. Meta also looked into acquiring Thinking Machines, a startup founded by the former OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati.

Meta reportedly recruits four former OpenAI researchers to its superintelligence lab - SiliconANGLE

Meta reportedly recruits four former OpenAI researchers to its superintelligence lab Meta Platforms Inc. has reportedly recruited four former OpenAI researchers to its newly launched superintelligence lab. TechCrunch today cited a source as saying that the hires include Trapit Bansal, who joined the ChatGPT developer in 2022. He reportedly played a key role in launching OpenAI's reinforcement learning program. Reinforcement learning is an AI training method that lends itself to building reasoning models. The three other OpenAI researchers who have reportedly joined Meta are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. The Wall Street Journal cited sources as saying that the trio helped establish the company's office in Zurich late last year. They earlier worked at Alphabet Inc.'s Google DeepMind machine learning research lab. The hires come a few weeks after word first emerged that Meta is forming a superintelligence research group. The lab will be tasked with developing AI models that can outperform humans across a wide range of tasks. The company reportedly launched the unit in response to issues with Llama 4 Behemoth, an internally-developed large language model that it previewed earlier this year. Meta has had to delay the algorithm's launch over concerns about its performance. Last week, OpenAI revealed that the Facebook parent had tried to poach some of its employees with up to $100 million sign-up bonuses. According to Journal, several of the ChatGPT developer's researchers have declined Meta's offers. In some cases, OpenAI reportedly offered staffers "more money and scope to stay." Meta is not limiting its recruiting push to OpenAI's workforce. Earlier this month, the company hired Alexandr Wang, the Chief Executive Officer of AI training dataset provider ScaleAI Inc. Meta also invested $14.3 billion in the startup for a 49% stake. More high-profile hires could be announced in the coming weeks. Bloomberg reported today that Meta is in advanced talks to acquire PlayAI Inc., a Palo Alto, California-based voice AI developer. It's backed by about $21 million in funding from Y Combinator and other institutional investors. The deal is expected to see the Facebook parent hire several of PlayAI's employees. The startup provides a cloud platform for creating voice AI agents. The software is powered by two custom AI models known as Play AI 3.0 mini and Dialog. The former algorithm is optimized for hardware-efficiency, while the latter features ten times as many parameters and offers higher output quality. Meta is reportedly also seeking to hire tech investor Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The duo currently work at Safe Superintelligence Inc., a startup they co-founded last year with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Like Meta's new superintelligence unit, the company is seeking to develop AI models that can perform many tasks better than humans.

Meet Meta's New Superintelligence Dream Team | AIM

This follows Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier in June. Social Media giant Meta announced on July 1 that Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, has been appointed as Meta's chief AI officer and will co-lead Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) with Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub. This follows Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier in June. The company has been on an AI hiring blitz, recruiting top talent from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and DeepMind, with some signing bonuses reportedly reaching up to $100 million. The following individuals comprise the superintelligence team. Trapit Bansal is recognised for his pioneering work in applying reinforcement learning to chain-of-thought reasoning within large language models. As a co-creator of OpenAI's o-series models, Bansal has played a pivotal role in advancing model interpretability and robustness. His research focuses on developing training methodologies that enhance both the reasoning capabilities and efficiency of modern AI systems. Shuchao Bi contributed significantly to the development of GPT-4o's voice mode and the o4-mini model. At OpenAI, he led efforts in multimodal post-training, which involved refining how models process and generate outputs across text, audio, and visual inputs. Huiwen Chang was instrumental in designing GPT-4o's image generation features and has a strong background in generative AI. Previously at Google Research, she invented the MaskGIT and Muse architectures, both of which have become foundational in the field of text-to-image synthesis. Ji Lin played a key role in building a suite of influential models, including o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 4o-ImageGen, and the Operator reasoning stack. His contributions span the development of advanced reasoning mechanisms and architectural improvements, enabling these models to perform a wide range of complex AI tasks more effectively. At Anthropic, Joel Pobar led work on inference optimisation. He previously spent over a decade at Meta, where he contributed to the development of core infrastructure projects, including HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, and various performance and machine learning tools. His deep experience in software engineering and AI has been critical to improving the speed and scalability of AI inference systems. Jack Rae serves as the pre-training technical lead for Gemini and leads reasoning for Gemini 2.5. At DeepMind, he spearheaded early large language model projects including Gopher and Chinchilla. His expertise lies in large-scale pre-training strategies and improving the reasoning capabilities of cutting-edge AI models. Hongyu Ren is a co-creator of several OpenAI models, including GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3, and o4-mini. He previously led a post-training group at OpenAI, focusing on refining and optimising large language models for greater accuracy and efficiency through advanced post-training techniques. Johan Schalkwyk, a former Google Fellow, was an early contributor to the Sesame project and served as the technical lead for Maya. His extensive background in AI research and development has influenced foundational advancements in machine learning frameworks and AI technologies. Pei Sun worked on post-training, coding, and reasoning for the Gemini project at Google DeepMind. Previously, he developed the last two generations of perception models for Waymo, demonstrating his expertise in AI for autonomous vehicles. His current focus is on enhancing reasoning and real-world application capabilities in advanced AI systems. Jiahui Yu is a co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4o. He previously led OpenAI's perception team and co-led multimodal research for Gemini. His work is centred on advancing AI perception and integrating multimodal understanding, enabling models to process and generate information across diverse data types. Shengjia Zhao has been a co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, the mini model series, 4.1, and o3. At OpenAI, he led synthetic data initiatives, focusing on improving the diversity and quality of training data. His innovations in data synthesis have been crucial for enhancing model generalisation and overall performance.

Inside the Great AI Talent Heist of 2025 | AIM

Meta is rattling OpenAI with an aggressive hiring spree. In just one week, it pulled in eight researchers from OpenAI. The social media giant has stepped up recruitment for its Superintelligence team. Recent hires include Shengjia Zhao, who worked on GPT-4, Jiahui Yu, former head of OpenAI's Perception team, Shuchao Bi, who managed multimodal models; and Hongyu Ren, who led training for the o3-mini, o1-mini, and o1 models, where he was a foundational contributor. He also worked on an upcoming open-source model. Trapit Bansal, a foundational contributor to OpenAI's first reasoning model, o1 and a key figure in reinforcement learning, has also joined Meta's AI superintelligence team. Previously, the company hired three researchers, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, who were responsible for setting up OpenAI's Zurich office last year. The Wired quoted Meta's chief research officer, Mark Chen, as saying in a Slack memo to their staff that the departures felt "as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something." Chen added that the leadership team, including CEO Sam Altman, is working "around the clock" to engage with employees who have received competing offers from Meta. Amid the hiring tension, OpenAI is also taking a collective pause to address the overwork culture. The company has announced a week off for all employees. "This has been planned for quite some time. I won't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm super happy for the company to be closed for the week," said OpenAI's Adam Goldberg in a post on X. Goldberg said that taking individual time off can feel like you're missing out on what's happening at work, but when the entire company shuts down for a week, it allows everyone to truly unwind without that sense of missing something. "It's been an amazing first half of the year, now with Q2 close, we recharge and then get back to the grind for a big 2H and beyond." In a recent podcast with his brother, Jack Altman, Sam Altman said that Meta views OpenAI as its primary competitor. He also mentioned that Meta is offering extremely high compensation packages to OpenAI employees, including signing bonuses of $100 million or more. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally recruiting for a new "superintelligence" team, offering hefty payouts to top AI researchers across the industry. Just last week, the tech giant announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and brought on Scale's CEO, Alexandr Wang, to join the Superintelligence team. Meta, too, like OpenAI, uses the term "superintelligence" rather than AGI, even though the tech and AI giants have yet to achieve it. That said, in a recent blog post, Altman wrote that the arrival of superintelligence could be just a few thousand days away. "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!). It may take longer, but I'm confident we'll get there." Altman added that many people in Meta's AI team are trying to copy OpenAI. He also said that while OpenAI began as a deep research lab, it has recently had to evolve into a commercial tech product organisation, especially after launching ChatGPT. Altman stated that while many around the world view ChatGPT as a substitute for Google, at Meta, it is seen more as a replacement for Facebook. He also mentioned that users are increasingly turning to ChatGPT instead of traditional social media platforms. Altman suggests it's not just about how much time people spend online, but how they feel afterwards. "People like doomscrolling on the internet. It may feel good at the moment, but it's making you feel worse," he said. By contrast, he says users often walk away from ChatGPT with a more positive outlook."A thing that we're very proud of is when people talk about ChatGPT, they're like, 'I actually like myself better.'" Based on these observations, OpenAI has made its latest acquisition. The AI startup has acquired Crossing Minds, a company specialising in infrastructure for personalised recommendations and real-time machine learning. This move is likely to help OpenAI capture more user attention and time, as it works to make ChatGPT more personalised based on individual interests. Notably, ChatGPT now also features a memory function that allows it to recall past conversations. OpenAI has recently made ChatGPT's memory feature available to free users, a function that was earlier limited to Plus and Pro subscribers. As of June 3, 2025, this "lightweight" version enables ChatGPT to recall recent conversations, allowing it to deliver more personalised and context-aware responses while reducing the need for users to repeat themselves. Founded in early 2017 by Sebastian Thrun, Emile Contal, and Alexandre Robicquet, Crossing Minds was started to build AI that understands people on a deeper level, not just what they might do next, but what they care about over time. The company has developed tools that integrate with real-time systems and complex infrastructure, and more recently, it has explored new methods for handling information using large language models. "Truly understanding people's intents is the foundation of outstanding AI assistants," the Crossing Minds team said in a statement. "Not merely predicting next actions, but learning long-term preferences, and what makes each of us unique." A few months ago, reports surfaced that OpenAI is working on a social media platform similar to X. The platform is expected to combine ChatGPT's advanced AI features, particularly its image generation tools, with a personalised content feed. Soon after, Meta released the first version of its standalone Meta AI app. It is built to provide a personalised assistant experience across devices, including Meta's AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses and the web. The app features voice-based interaction, contextual memory, and a Discover feed that showcases how users are engaging with AI. This seems to be just the beginning of the war between Meta and OpenAI. The latter is also planning to release an open-source model next month. "Sorry to hype, but having a few friends at OpenAI makes it hard not to hear how wild their open-source model dropping next month is. It won't run on a phone, but let's just say it edges out one of the models in the ChatGPT dropdown. Meta's gonna need some time to catch up," said Yuchen Jin, cofounder of Hyperbolic. OpenAI's message to Meta seems clear: catch us if you can.

Meta hires former OpenAI top talent amid AGI push

Meta's latest AI hire follows several developments and partnerships aimed at making the tech giant a leader in the burgeoning sector. Tech company Meta has hired Trapit Bansal, a former key researcher at artificial intelligence company OpenAI, who was central to developing the firm's o1 reasoning AI model. Bansal is the latest ex-OpenAI researcher to join the Meta team, following the addition of Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, according to TechCrunch. The hires are part of Meta's push to expand its AI operations and overhaul the capabilities of its reasoning models by training its AI on real-world scenarios to cultivate intelligence. Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun previously said: "There are four essential characteristics of intelligent behavior that every animal, or relatively smart animal, can do, and certainly humans: understanding the physical world, having persistent memory, being able to reason, and being able to plan complex actions -- particularly planning hierarchically." Meta's AI development came into sharper focus earlier this year, as advancements in artificial intelligence became a top priority for governments around the world seeking to win the international AI race. Related: OpenAI cuts ties with Scale AI amid data labeler's new Meta deal -- Report Meta leans heavily into AI with stock acquisitions, energy deals, and defense partnerships In June, Meta acquired a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data labeling company that provides services to AI platforms, valued at nearly $15 billion. As part of the purchase, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang will join Meta to collaborate on further AI development. The Facebook parent company also signed a 20-year nuclear energy deal with electricity provider Constellation Energy to receive 1.1 gigawatts of power to fuel its AI data centers and infrastructure. According to a June 3 announcement, the energy will be sourced from Constellation's Clinton Clean Energy Center in the US state of Illinois, with delivery starting in 2027. Anduril, a defense contractor specializing in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, partnered with Meta in May to develop AI-powered augmented reality headsets for the United States military. The headset will integrate Anduril's Lattice platform, an AI-powered information system that organizes tactical battlefield data from various sensors and weapons platforms into a comprehensive information source for soldiers, the defense company said in a May 29 announcement.

Zuckerberg announces Meta 'superintelligence' effort

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Meta Platforms chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg announced a major restructuring of the company's artificial intelligence 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 (Tuesday AEST) to employees that Meta's AI efforts will fall under a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, 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.

'I'll Fight to Keep Every One of You': OpenAI Responds to Meta Poaching Talent, Says It Is 'Recalibrating' Pay

Chen said that OpenAI was "recalibrating" compensation in response to Meta's offers. Meta has reportedly been compiling a list of top talent to poach in the AI talent wars -- and OpenAI researchers are on it. According to recent reports, Meta has successfully poached eight OpenAI staff members in the past two weeks for its AI efforts. Now, OpenAI leadership is reassuring staff that the company is fighting back against Meta in the war for AI talent. OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen sent a memo to staff on Saturday stating that OpenAI would take steps to counter Meta stealing talent. The memo was sent to employees in Slack and obtained by Wired. "I have a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen stated in the memo. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." Chen said that he was collaborating with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to talk to employees with competing offers from Meta. Company leadership is "recalibrating" compensation and "scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent" in response to these offers, Chen wrote. Related: Meta Is Reportedly Offering Up to Nine-Figure Pay for Researchers on Its New Superintelligence AI Team However, while OpenAI wants to keep its staff, it also wants to keep compensation "fair" among employees. "While I'll fight to keep every one of you, I won't do so at the price of fairness to others," Chen wrote in the memo. Last week, Meta reportedly hired top OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal and three other OpenAI employees who set up the company's Zurich office: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. The Information reported on Saturday that Meta had hired four more OpenAI AI researchers: Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Meta's hiring push is due to the company's focus on a new superintelligence lab. The team will consist of roughly 50 employees who will work closely with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to develop superintelligence, or AI that exceeds human intelligence in reasoning, memory, and knowledge. Zuckerberg reportedly wants Meta to be the first company to achieve superintelligence, with the goal of bringing advanced AI capabilities to Meta's products, like its chatbot and smart glasses. Related: Meta Is Reportedly Planning to Release New AI Smart Glasses With Oakley and Prada Zuckerberg has been prepared to compensate new superintelligence employees handsomely. The New York Times reported that the CEO offered potential new hires compensation in the millions. Altman said earlier this month that Meta was trying to recruit OpenAI researchers with "$100 million" signing bonuses and "more than that" in compensation, but that none of OpenAI's "best people" had taken the offer. However, Meta leadership has pushed back against Altman's statement. At Meta's leaked all-hands meeting last week, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, said that Altman was "being dishonest" about the size and scope of the offers. One of the OpenAI employees Meta poached, Lucas Beyer, also posted on X that he did not receive a $100 million signing bonus.

Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Meta Superintelligence Labs, Names Who He Poached From OpenAI, Google, Anthropic

The new unit includes Meta's existing teams that focus on developing AI models and products, as well as its fundamental AI research team. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, is reshaping the company's AI efforts to focus on superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence. In a memo to employees on Monday, released in full by CNBC, Zuckerberg announced that a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, will house Meta's AI initiatives going forward. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old former CEO of AI training data startup Scale AI, will lead the group and assume the newly created role of Meta's Chief AI Officer (Meta has a separate Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun). Related: 'I'll Fight to Keep Every One of You': OpenAI Responds to Meta Poaching Talent, Says It Is 'Recalibrating' Pay In the memo, Zuckerberg called Wang the "most impressive founder of his generation" and said that former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman would "partner" with Wang to lead the MSL team. The new unit will encompass Meta's existing teams that focus on developing AI models and AI products. It will also include Meta's fundamental AI research (FAIR) team. "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. "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 previously announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier this month in exchange for a 49% stake and fresh talent from the startup, including Wang. Zuckerberg also wrote that Meta would bring on 11 new hires for MSL, including researchers from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The new team includes former Google DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, OpenAI researchers Trapit Bansal and Hongyu Ren, and Anthropic software engineer Joel Pobar. In the memo, Zuckerberg said that Meta's vision for AI was "personal superintelligence for everyone" and that the company was going to start working on its next generation of AI models to debut "in the next year or so." Meta has a broad reach: Zuckerberg disclosed in May that the company's AI is used by more than one billion monthly active users across its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The company is also investing heavily in AI, with plans to spend $60 billion to $65 billion this year alone on AI infrastructure. Related: Meta Takes on ChatGPT By Releasing a Standalone AI App: 'A Long Journey' Meta also isn't afraid to spend heavily on AI talent. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated earlier this month that Meta was offering "$100 million signing bonuses" and "more than that" in compensation to many OpenAI researchers in an effort to poach talent. Meta's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, refuted the claims last week in a leaked all-hands meeting, saying that Altman was "being dishonest" about the signing bonuses and compensation. "Look, you guys, the market's hot," Bosworth said at the meeting. "It's not that hot." Meta is the sixth most valuable company in the world, at press time, with a market cap of over $1.8 trillion.

Meta Creates Superintelligence Labs to Head Its AI Projects: Report

Meta's new team will reportedly develop new large language models Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) was reportedly created by the company CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. As per multiple reports, the new group was created as a part of the restructuring of the existing Meta AI division. The MSL group is now said to be heading the division with a focus on developing the next generation of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the company. The group will be headed by the former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta this month. According to a Bloomberg report, Zuckerberg wrote a memo to Meta staff informing them about the restructuring process and the creation of MSL. Based on documents seen by the publication, MSL will be headed by Wang and lead the existing AI division. The Meta CEO reportedly called Wang the "most impressive founder of his generation." The former CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub, Nat Friedman, will reportedly "partner with Alex to lead" MSL. Meta has reportedly made 11 new hirings for the group, with the new employees joining from rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and more. In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), Wang confirmed his new designation as Chief AI Officer of Meta. He also shared the list of 11 new members of the team that will join him and Friedman to form the Meta Superintelligence Labs. Among them are former OpenAI employees such as Trapit Bansal, co-creator of the o-series models; Shuchao Bi, who co-developed GPT-4o's Voice Mode; and Huiwen Chang, the co-creator of GPT-4o's image generation capabilities. Others include former employees of DeepMind and Anthropic. The Verge claimed that each of these new hires is earning in the eight figures. Here's the full list of the team members under the MSL group: "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. 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," Bloomberg quoted Zuckerberg as saying.

Meta Announces Formation of 'Superintelligence' Unit Amid AI Recruiting Push

Some in the industry are skeptical that the current crop of generative AI models are capable of being developed into AGI or superintelligence. Meta Platforms (META) informed employees on Monday of the creation of a new unit inside the Facebook and Instagram parent following an expensive recruiting push to ramp up Meta's artificial intelligence development. The new unit will be dubbed the "Superintelligence" unit, named for its goal of creating an AI that has more capabilities than a human brain, per an internal memo reported by several outlets. The news follows reports in recent weeks that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally involved in recruiting new hires for the unit, with packages including signing bonuses up to $100 million offered to certain employees at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and others. Alexandr Wang, CEO of an AI startup called Scale that Meta recently acquired, will lead the unit as Meta's "Chief AI Officer," the memo said. It also laid out a number of new hires to join the team, including several from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind lab, and Amazon (AMZN)-backed Anthropic. What would constitute developments to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence varies across the industry, and some researchers have said there's little evidence that Meta -- or any other tech giant -- is close to making those leaps. Meta did not immediately respond to Investopedia's request for comment. Shares were little changed just after markets opened Tuesday, after rising 0.6% to close at a record $738.09 on Monday.

Mark Zuckerberg's A.I. Hiring Spree Targets OpenAI and DeepMind

From billion-dollar investments to personal pitches, Meta is waging a full-scale war for the future of A.I. supremacy. Mark Zuckerberg's frenzied plan to snap up A.I. talent through personalized outreach, aggressive pitches and eight-figure bonuses appears to be paying off. Meta has recruited OpenAI staffers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai to join its newly-formed team dedicated to advanced forms of A.I., as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters The three researchers all formerly worked at Google DeepMind and were relatively new to OpenAI, having been tapped by the ChatGPT-maker at the end of last year to open an office in Zurich. A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed that the trio have departed the company but declined to comment further. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has so far appeared unfazed by Zuckerberg's efforts to poach his staffers. "It's like, okay, Zuckerberg is doing some new insane thing, what's next?" Altman said on the Hard Fork podcast this week. The scale of Meta's hiring push became clear earlier this month when the company brought on Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old CEO of Scale AI, following an investment of more than $14 billion in his company. Wang is expected to play a central role in Meta's new A.I. unit, a roughly 50-person team focused on developing superintelligence, a form of A.I. with capabilities surpassing those of humans. In 2025, Zuckerberg has launched an aggressive spending campaign to accelerate Meta's A.I. ambitions and expand its data center and hardware infrastructure amid growing frustration with the company's progress in the field. Alongside plans to spend up to $72 billion on capital expenditures this year, he's pulling out all the stops to lure top talent from competitors, personally pitching recruits at his homes and rearranging office seating to position the superintelligence team nearby. In some cases, Meta has attempted to entice employees at OpenAI by promising signing bonuses as high as $100 million, revealed Altman earlier this month on an episode of the Uncapped podcast. "So far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," he said. But that's not for lack of trying -- Meta has apparently tried, and failed, to recruit OpenAI staffers including researchers Noam Brown and Bill Peebles and co-founder John Schulman. OpenAI isn't the only company on Zuckerberg's radar. The billionaire reportedly also tried to acquire Perplexity AI and Safe Superintelligence, the A.I. startup co-founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. After Meta was rebuffed by the latter, it instead recruited two of Safe Superintelligence's other key figures -- Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, according to CNBC. Other notable hires include Google DeepMind's Jack Rae and Sesame AI's Johan Schalkwyk. As Meta builds out its new A.I. unit, it's not the only player fueling an all-out hiring war. In response to Zuckerberg's aggressive recruitment tactics, rival companies have begun promoting staff or boosting compensation to retain top talent. Shortly after Meta approached Google DeepMind's Koray Kavukcuoglu, the researcher was promoted to Google's chief A.I. architect, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, according to Bloomberg. OpenAI has also reportedly countered Meta's overtures by offering targeted employees more money and greater responsibilities.

17 Top A.I. Researchers Who Just Joined Meta's Superintelligence Team

A large portion of Meta's new A.I. team hails from OpenAI -- and Sam Altman isn't exactly thrilled about it. The results of Meta's full-throttle hiring push to achieve advanced forms of A.I. is finally beginning to materialize. A new team at the Mark Zuckerberg-led company will be known as Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), according to an internal memo first reported by Bloomberg. Much to the frustration of Meta's rivals, the team is stacked with talent poached from top competitors like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters "As the pace of A.I. progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," said Zuckerberg in the memo, referencing a form of A.I. that boasts capabilities superior to humans. "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." Impatient with Meta's slow progress in A.I., Zuckerberg in recent months has personally spearheaded an aggressive recruiting campaign. To lure talent from OpenAI, Meta is offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, as revealed by Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, during a podcast interview in June. Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, will serve as Meta's new chief A.I. officer and lead the MSL team. The 28-year-old recently joined Zuckerberg's efforts after Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI, which specializes in labelling data for A.I. systems. Wang will co-lead the new group with Nat Friedman, the former head of Github, said Wang in a post on X yesterday (June 30), which also included a roster of other new hires joining the team. "Towards superintelligence," noted Wang, who said he's "thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people." The division will include former Google DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, alongside Anthropic's Joel Pobar and Sesame AI's Johan Schalkwyk. One notable absence from the list of hires shared by Wang is Daniel Gross, a co-founder of startup Safe Superintelligence and an investment partner of Friedman. He's also expected to join Meta's new A.I. efforts, according to CNBC. The largest tranche of Meta's new hires hail from OpenAI. In addition to nabbing researchers like Ji Lin, Hongyu Ren and Jiahui Yu, who contributed to releases like o3 and GPT-4o, MSL includes Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT, and Trapit Bansal, a top reinforcement learning researcher. Other notable additions include Suchao Bi and Huiwen Chang, who helped build GPT-4o's voice mode and image generation features, respectively. Noticeably missing from Meta's MSL list are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. The three former OpenAI staffers recently announced plans to join Meta. According to an X post by Beyer, their absence is due to "some technicalities." He also clarified that the trio, who previously helped launch OpenAI's Zurich office, did not receive the $100 million signing bonuses Altman mentioned, and that they will not be working directly with Yann LeCun, Meta's chief A.I. scientist. As for OpenAI, the company is now reevaluating compensation across the board in an effort to keep more researchers from jumping ship. Internal messages from Altman, reported by Wired, sought to reassure staff that Meta's recruiting push hadn't managed to poach the most critical talent. "Meta is acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful, I assume things will get even crazier in the future," the OpenAI chief reportedly told employees via Slack. "Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list."

AI talent war: OpenAI executives slam Meta's aggressive hiring approach - The Economic Times

Mark Zuckerberg has been hiring aggressively to build an AI team and had offered signing bonuses as high as $100 million to some OpenAI employees, Sam Altman said in his brother's podcast. The Facebook cofounder is building a new 50 people AI 'superintelligence' team after Meta's latest Llama models failed to gain traction compared to rivals.The race to dominate artificial intelligence (AI) is intensifying and tensions between Meta and OpenAI are rising. The Mark Zuckerberg-led social media giant has already poached OpenAI's top researchers with lucrative offers and is reportedly still on the lookout for more talent. According to a report by Wired, OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, has addressed Meta's aggressive recruitment tactics in a memo sent to employees on Saturday. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote in his memo. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by," he added. Zuckerberg has been hiring aggressively to build an AI team and had offered signing bonuses as high as $100 million to some OpenAI employees, Sam Altman said in his brother's podcast. The Facebook cofounder is building a new 50 people AI 'superintelligence' team after Meta's latest Llama models failed to gain traction compared to rivals. OpenAI's response to Meta "Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages," Chen wrote in a message on Slack, as per Weird report. Chen also said he has been working alongside Sam Altman and other company leaders "to talk to those with offers". "We've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognise and reward top talent," he added. The report states that OpenAI staff have been grappling with an intense workload as many employees work 80 hours per week. The AI startup is largely shutting down next week to give employees time to recharge, but it knows Meta might use this time to poach its top talent. "Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and will take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation," another leader at the company wrote, according to Chen's memo.

In pursuit of godlike technology, Mark Zuckerberg amps up the AI race - The Economic Times

In April, Meta's AI ambitions faltered as its new model underperformed rivals, prompting CEO Mark Zuckerberg to overhaul strategy. He demoted leaders, invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, aggressively recruited top talent -- some with $100M offers -- and expanded Meta's AI team, aiming to reassert Meta's place in the superintelligence race.In April, Mark Zuckerberg's lofty plans for the future of artificial intelligence crashed into reality. Weeks earlier, the 41-year-old CEO of Meta had publicly boasted that his company's new AI model, which would power the latest chatbots and other cutting-edge experiments, would be a "beast." Internally, Zuckerberg told employees that he wanted it to rival the AI systems of competitors like OpenAI and be able to drive features such as voice-powered chatbots, people who spoke with him said. But at Meta's AI conference that month, the new AI model did not perform as well as those of rivals. Features like voice interactions were not ready. Many developers, who attended the event with high expectations, left underwhelmed. Zuckerberg knew Meta was falling behind in AI, people close to him said, which was unacceptable. He began strategizing in a WhatsApp group with top executives, including Chris Cox, Meta's head of product, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, about what to do. That kicked off a frenzy of activity that has reverberated across Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg demoted Meta's vice president in charge of generative AI. He then invested $14.3 billion in the startup Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its 28-year-old founder. Meta approached other startups, including the AI search engine Perplexity, about deals. And Zuckerberg and his colleagues have embarked on a hiring binge, including reaching out this month to more than 45 AI researchers at rival OpenAI alone. Some received formal offers, with at least one as high as $100 million, two people with knowledge of the matter said. At least four OpenAI researchers have accepted Meta's offers. In another extraordinary move, executives in Meta's AI division discussed "de-investing" in its AI model, Llama, two people familiar with the discussions said. Llama is an "open source" model, with its underlying technology publicly shared for others to build on. They discussed embracing AI models from competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have "closed" code bases. A Meta spokesperson said company officials "remain fully committed to developing Llama and plan to have multiple additional releases this year alone." Zuckerberg has ramped up his activity to keep Meta competitive in a wildly ambitious race that has erupted within the broader AI contest. He is chasing a hypothetically godlike technology called "superintelligence," which is AI that would be more powerful than the human brain. Only a few Silicon Valley companies -- OpenAI, Anthropic and Google -- are considered to have the know-how to develop this, and Zuckerberg wants to ensure that Meta is included, people close to him said. "He is like a lot of CEOs at big tech companies who are telling themselves that AI is going to be the biggest thing they have seen in their lifetime, and if they don't figure out how to become a big player in it, they are going to be left behind," said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. He added, "It is worth anything to prevent that." Leaders at other tech behemoths are also going to extremes to capture future innovation that they believe will be worth trillions of dollars. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have supersized their AI investments to keep up with one another. And the war for talent has exploded, vaulting AI specialists into the same compensation stratosphere as NBA stars. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, and his top AI lieutenant, Demis Hassabis, as well as the chief executives of Microsoft and OpenAI, Satya Nadella and Sam Altman, are personally involved in recruiting researchers, two people with knowledge of the approaches said. Some tech companies are offering multimillion-dollar packages to AI technologists over email without a single interview. "The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible, and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive," Meta's Bosworth said in a CNBC interview last week. He said Altman had made counteroffers to some of the people Meta had tried to hire. OpenAI and Google declined to comment. Some details of Meta's efforts were previously reported by Bloomberg and The Information. For years, Meta appeared to keep pace in the AI race. More than a decade ago, Zuckerberg hired Yann LeCun, who is considered a pioneer of modern AI. LeCun co-founded FAIR -- or Fundamental AI Research -- which became Meta's artificial intelligence research arm. After OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, Meta responded the next year by creating a generative AI team under one of its executives, Ahmad Al-Dahle, to spread the technology throughout the company's products. Meta also open-sourced its AI models, sharing the underlying computer code with others to entrench its technology and spread AI development. But as OpenAI and Google built AI chatbots that could listen, look and talk, and rolled out AI systems designed to "reason," Meta struggled to do the same. One reason was that the company had less experience with a technique called "reinforcement learning," which others were using to build AI. Late last year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek released AI models that were built upon Llama but were more advanced and required fewer resources to create. Meta's open-source strategy, once seen as a competitive advantage, appeared to have let others get a leg up on it. Zuckerberg knew he needed to act. Around that time, outside AI researchers began receiving emails from him, asking if they would be interested in joining Meta, two people familiar with the outreach said. In April, Meta released two new versions of Llama, asserting that the models performed as well as or better than comparable ones from OpenAI and Google. To prove its claim, Meta cited its own testing benchmarks. On Instagram, Zuckerberg championed the releases in a video selfie. But some independent researchers quickly deduced that Meta's benchmarks were designed to make one of its models look more advanced than it was. They became incensed. Zuckerberg later learned that his AI team had wanted the models to appear to perform well, even though they were not doing as well as hoped, people with knowledge of the matter said. Zuckerberg was not briefed on the customized tests and was upset, two people said. His solution was to throw more bodies at the problem. Meta's AI division swelled to more than 1,000 people this year, up from a few hundred two years earlier. The rapid growth led to infighting and management squabbles. And with Zuckerberg's round-the-clock, hard-charging management style -- his attention on a project is often compared to the "Eye of Sauron" internally, a reference to the "Lord of the Rings" villain -- some engineers burned out and left. Executives hunkered down to brainstorm next steps, including potentially ratcheting back investment in Llama. In May, Zuckerberg sidelined Al-Dahle and ramped up recruitment of top AI researchers to lead a superintelligence lab. Armed with his checkbook, Zuckerberg sent more emails and text messages to prospective candidates, asking them to meet at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Zuckerberg often takes recruitment meetings in an enclosed glass conference room, informally known as "the aquarium." The outreach included talking to Perplexity about an acquisition, two people familiar with the talks said. No deal has materialized. Zuckerberg also spoke with Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and a renowned AI researcher, about potentially joining Meta, two people familiar with the approach said. Sutskever, who runs the startup Safe Superintelligence, declined the overture. He did not respond to a request for comment. But Zuckerberg won over Wang of Scale, which works with data to train AI systems. They had met through friends and are also connected through Elliot Schrage, a former Meta executive who is an investor in Scale and adviser to Wang. This month, Meta announced that it would take a minority stake in Scale and bring on Wang -- who is not known for having deep technical expertise but has many contacts in AI circles -- as well as several of his top executives to help run the superintelligence lab. Meta is now in talks with Safe Superintelligence's CEO, Daniel Gross, and his investment partner Nat Friedman to join, a person with knowledge of the talks said. They did not respond to requests for comment.

The AI frenzy is escalating. Again. - The Economic Times

Silicon Valley witnesses a surge in AI investments. Tech giants like Meta and Amazon are heavily investing in data centers and AI talent. Meta offers huge signing bonuses to AI researchers. Venture capitalists increase AI investments by 550% since 2022. Companies acquire startups for their talent. Apple is also exploring AI opportunities.Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence frenzy has found a new gear. Two and a half years after OpenAI set off the artificial intelligence race with the release of the chatbot ChatGPT, tech companies are accelerating their AI spending, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into their frantic effort to create systems that can mimic or even exceed the abilities of the human brain. The tech industry's giants are building data centres that can cost more than $100 billion and will consume more electricity than 1 million American homes. Salaries for AI experts are jumping as Meta offers signing bonuses to AI researchers that top $100 million. And venture capitalists are dialling up their spending. US investment in AI companies rose to $65 billion in the first quarter, up 33% from the previous quarter and up 550% from the quarter before ChatGPT came out in 2022, according to data from PitchBook, which tracks the industry. "Everyone is deeply afraid of being left behind," said Chris V. Nicholson, an investor with the venture capital firm Page One Ventures who focuses on AI technologies. This astonishing spending, critics argue, comes with a huge risk. AI is arguably more expensive than anything the tech industry has tried to build, and there is no guarantee it will live up to its potential. But the bigger risk, many executives believe, is not spending enough to keep pace with rivals. "The thinking from the big CEOs is that they can't afford to be wrong by doing too little, but they can afford to be wrong by doing too much," said Jordan Jacobs, a partner with the venture capital firm Radical Ventures. The biggest spending is for the data centres. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have told investors that they expect to spend a combined $320 billion on infrastructure costs this year. Much of that will go toward building new data centres -- more than twice what they spent two years ago. As OpenAI and its partners build a roughly $60 billion data centre complex for AI in Texas and another in the Middle East, Meta is erecting a facility in Louisiana that will be twice as large. Amazon is going even bigger with a new campus in Indiana. Amazon's partner, the AI startup Anthropic, says it could eventually use all 30 of the data centres on this 1,200-acre campus to train a single AI system. Some experts question whether companies like Anthropic will continue to improve their AI systems at the rapid rate they have maintained over the last few years. But Amazon says that even if the progress stops, it will use those 30 data centres to deliver AI systems to customers. These companies are spending so much on data centres, they see no problem with dropping several billions more to buy a startup or millions on a world-class AI researcher. In 2013, Google shocked Silicon Valley when it paid $44 million for just three researchers. Today, that seems like table stakes. Meta just invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, a startup that helps collect and organise the enormous amounts of digital data needed to train AI systems. In return, Meta landed Scale AI's young chief executive, Alexandr Wang, who is considered an up-and-coming deal maker in the AI world. Meta was not the first big technology company to make such an unusual deal. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have also been investing hundreds of millions -- or even billions -- in startups just for the right to hire their employees and use their technology. In essence, they bought everything but the startups. "Companies are acquiring other companies not necessarily for their products or their services or their revenues but just for their talent," said Dimitri Zabelin, an emerging-technology analyst at PitchBook. The Scale AI investment was part of an effort by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, to start an AI research lab dedicated to the creation of superintelligence, a hypothetical technology that would be more powerful than the brain. Zuckerberg has been offering compensation packages worth as much as $100 million a person. He and his company made more than 45 offers to researchers at OpenAI alone, according to a person familiar with these approaches. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the suit's claims.) One Silicon Valley giant, Apple, has been more cautious about chatbots. But as the AI race escalates, Apple is also scrambling for talent. The company has had internal discussions about buying the AI startup Perplexity, according to a person familiar with those conversations. Perplexity is valued at $14 billion. "Apple seems to be sitting on its hands. But I am sure they will surprise us before too long," said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture firm Menlo Ventures. An Apple spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. But as venture firms double down on their deal making, there is less appetite for investing in general AI systems designed to do everything, because that work is dominated by established companies like OpenAI and Google. Instead, they are starting to focus on AI that does specific tasks, like Ribbon, a company that does AI for job interviews, and Eleos Health, which creates AI to record and summarise doctor visits. Tech companies acknowledge that they may be overestimating AI's potential. But even if the technology falls short, many executives and investors believe the investments they're making now will be worth it. "Christopher Columbus thought he was headed to the Orient, and he ended up in the Caribbean," said Nicholson of Page One Ventures. "He did not get to where he thought he was going, but he still got to a place that was highly valuable."

Meta has set up AI superintelligence team with hires from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic: Reports - The Economic Times

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast that Meta was recruiting AI researchers from his company, offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Separately, OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, addressed Meta's aggressive recruitment tactics in a memo sent to employees on June 29.Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Monday that the company will soon introduce them to its newly formed superintelligence team, as per media reports. The memo lists names and bios for the recently hired employees, many of whom came from rival AI firms OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. "We're going to call our overall organisation Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo on Monday. "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," he added. Leading the pack is Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, who joins as Meta's Chief AI Officer. He's teaming up with Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, who will lead the AI product side. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast that Meta was recruiting AI researchers from his company, offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Separately, OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, addressed Meta's aggressive recruitment tactics in a memo sent to employees on June 29. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote in his memo. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by," he added. Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth told CNBC's "Closing Bell Overtime" in an interview on June 20 that OpenAI was countering Meta's offers.

Clash of tech titans: Why Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman are locked in an AI talent war

Meta and OpenAI are locked in a fierce fight for the brightest minds in artificial intelligence. Meta has lured top researchers from OpenAI with staggering pay, signing bonuses rumoured to reach $100 million. OpenAI's leaders, including CEO Sam Altman and Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, have pushed back hard, framing Meta's moves as a direct assault on their culture. As Mark Zuckerberg's new Superintelligence Lab takes shape, this battle could define who leads the next wave of AI breakthroughs.Meta's push to grab AI talent from OpenAI has turned into one of Silicon Valley's biggest hiring wars. Mark Zuckerberg has not held back. He's stacked his new Meta Superintelligence Lab with elite researchers, many of them fresh from OpenAI's ranks. Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Hongyu Ren and Shuchao Bi were among the latest to jump ship. Their OpenAI Slack accounts went dark overnight. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Mark Chen, OpenAI's Chief Research Officer, wrote in a memo obtained by WIRED. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman says Meta's playbook is clear: jaw-dropping offers. On his brother's podcast, Altman said, "They've started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team." He claimed Meta has dangled signing bonuses as high as $100 million. "I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on that," Altman said. Inside OpenAI, that loyalty is gold. Chen promised staff, "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." The company is revising pay to match Meta's push, but leans on its mission as the stronger hook. Altman said bluntly, "Meta's current AI efforts have not worked as well as they hoped. It's not enough to catch up -- you have to actually innovate." Meta's boss is betting big. In an internal memo seen by CNBC, Zuckerberg wrote, "Developing superintelligence is coming into sight. I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity." He named Alexandr Wang, former Scale AI CEO, as Meta's Chief AI Officer to lead the new lab, alongside ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Meta's new team now includes ex-Google, DeepMind, and Anthropic engineers too. Some, like Jack Rae and Pei Sun, helped build the Gemini models. Others like Bi and Zhao shaped GPT-4o and other high-profile projects at OpenAI. Zuckerberg underlined Meta's advantage: compute power, global reach, and a "bold" culture. He promised a parallel path to the next generation of open-source AI models. His goal? "Personal superintelligence for everyone." It's not all smooth. Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth admitted the stakes are unlike anything he's seen in two decades. "The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented," Bosworth told CNBC. But when companies pay out huge sums to a few, tension can spread. Some Meta insiders worry the rush for big names could backfire if egos clash or projects stall. After all, open-sourcing Llama helped Meta win fans, but it has yet to rival ChatGPT's impact. At the heart of this fight is a tiny circle of AI experts. Everyone wants them -- Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI. That scarcity has turned AI talent into a commodity worth billions. Meta's failed attempt to buy Safe Superintelligence, the startup founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, shows how far companies will go to own the next breakthrough. When that didn't work, Zuckerberg turned to fresh hires instead. For now, the battle lines are drawn. Meta wants scale and speed. OpenAI wants loyalty and purpose. One side flashes cash. The other promises mission. With billions at stake, these talent raids will not stop soon. Some worry the frenzy could fracture teams or inflate costs beyond reason. But for now, Zuckerberg is clear: he wants Meta at the front of AI's next age. "We're still forming this group and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well," Zuckerberg wrote to staff. "I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent... will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone." In this race, money talks. But culture still whispers in the background -- just loud enough to keep OpenAI's best from walking out the door.

Meta spending big on AI talent but will it pay off? - The Economic Times

US media outlets have reported that Meta's recruitment effort has also targeted OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever; Google rival Perplexity AI, and hot AI video startup Runway. Meta chief Zuckerberg is reported to have sounded the charge himself due to worries Meta is lagging rivals in the generative AI race.Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are spending billions of dollars for top talent to make up ground in the generative artificial intelligence race, sparking doubt about the wisdom of the spree. OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently lamented that Meta has offered $100 million bonuses to engineers who jump to Zuckerberg's ship, where hefty salaries await. A few OpenAI employees have reportedly taken Meta up on the offer, joining Scale AI founder and former chief executive Alexandr Wang at the Menlo Park-based tech titan. Meta paid more than $14 billion for a 49 percent stake in Scale AI in mid-June, bringing Wang on board as part of the deal. Scale AI labels data to better train AI models for businesses, governments and labs. "Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI," a Meta spokesperson told AFP. "As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts." US media outlets have reported that Meta's recruitment effort has also targeted OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever; Google rival Perplexity AI, and hot AI video startup Runway. Meta chief Zuckerberg is reported to have sounded the charge himself due to worries Meta is lagging rivals in the generative AI race. The latest version of Meta AI model Llama finished behind its heavyweight rivals in code writing rankings at an LM Arena platform that lets users evaluate the technology. Meta is integrating recruits into a new team dedicated to developing "superintelligence," or AI that outperforms people when it comes to thinking and understanding. 'Mercenary' Tech blogger Zvi Moshowitz felt Zuckerberg had to do something about the situation, expecting Meta to succeed in attracting hot talent but questioning how well it will pay off. "There are some extreme downsides to going pure mercenary... and being a company with products no one wants to work on," Moshowitz told AFP. "I don't expect it to work, but I suppose Llama will suck less." While Meta's share price is nearing a new high with the overall value of the company approaching $2 trillion, some investors have started to worry. Institutional investors are concerned about how well Meta is managing its cash flow and reserves, according to Baird strategist Ted Mortonson. "Right now, there are no checks and balances" with Zuckerberg free to do as he wishes running Meta, Mortonson noted. The potential for Meta to cash in by using AI to rev its lucrative online advertising machine has strong appeal but "people have a real big concern about spending," said Mortonson. Meta executives have laid out a vision of using AI to streamline the ad process from easy creation to smarter targeting, bypassing creative agencies and providing a turnkey solution to brands. AI talent hires are a long-term investment unlikely to impact Meta's profitability in the immediate future, according to CFRA analyst Angelo Zino. "But still, you need those people on board now and to invest aggressively to be ready for that phase" of generative AI, Zino said. According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg is considering shifting away from Meta's Llama, perhaps even using competing AI models instead. Penn State University professor Mehmet Canayaz sees potential for Meta to succeed with AI agents tailored to specific tasks at its platform, not requiring the best large language model. "Even firms without the most advanced LLMs, like Meta, can succeed as long as their models perform well within their specific market segment," Canayaz said.

ChatGPT to be closed as OpenAI bleeds talent to Meta? Here's what OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen reveals

OpenAI will close for a full week to let its staff recover from intense 80-hour workweeks, Wired reports. The move aims to stop burnout and slow Meta's aggressive push to hire its best researchers with million-dollar deals. Inside the company, leaders promise fair pay, fresh strategies and a renewed focus on building artificial general intelligence. As top talent leaves for Meta's superintelligence lab, OpenAI now faces the deeper test: keeping its exhausted team loyal to its mission.OpenAI will shut its doors for a week to help burned-out employees rest, Wired reports. After months of 80-hour weeks, staff are being told to step away from their screens. Only top executives will stay on duty. The break is unusual. OpenAI rarely halts its intense push for artificial general intelligence (AGI). "Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and will take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation," Chief Research Officer Mark Chen warned in a Slack memo, as seen by Wired. This break lands at a tense moment. Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already hired away seven researchers from OpenAI. Among them are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai and Trapit Bansal, a key contributor to OpenAI's o1 model. Meta wants OpenAI's best. And it knows exactly when to strike. "Meta knows we're taking this week to recharge and will take advantage of it to try and pressure you to make decisions fast and in isolation," Chen repeated in the same message. Meta's offers are no small talk. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, told his brother Jack on a podcast that Meta has dangled signing bonuses over $100 million for some staff. "Over the past month, Meta has been aggressively building out their new AI effort, and has repeatedly (and mostly unsuccessfully) tried to recruit some of our strongest talent with comp-focused packages," Chen wrote on Slack. A source close to Meta told Wired the company wants the best from OpenAI and Google. "They haven't necessarily expanded the band, but for top talent, the sky is the limit," the source said. Lucas Beyer, who recently left OpenAI for Meta Platforms, has denied claims that he was lured with a huge payout. In a direct post on X (formerly Twitter), he wrote, "Hey all, couple quick notes: 1) Yes, we will be joining Meta. 2) No, we did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news. Excited about what's ahead though, will share more in due time." Beyer's response came after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the Uncapped podcast that Meta made "giant offers" to poach his people. "Like $100 million signing bonuses. It is crazy," Altman said on air. He also claimed he was relieved people had turned the offers down. Beyer is not the only OpenAI researcher jumping ship. Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai have joined him, leaving OpenAI's Zurich office for Meta's expanding AI push. According to The Information, the list is growing. Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi and Hongyu Ren are also said to be joining Mark Zuckerberg's superintelligence effort soon. The impact runs deep. Cheng Lu, a technical staff member at OpenAI, posted on X, "Not too many people outside the company know how talented and hardcore they are." He added, "Such a huge loss to OpenAI and I feel really disappointed that the leadership didn't keep them." His post went viral before he deleted it. OpenAI staff admit the fatigue is real. Inside, some feel Meta is pouncing while they're exhausted. "If they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, it's not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision," one research leader wrote to staff, as Wired confirmed. Chen says OpenAI is adjusting pay and reward structures. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote. He added, "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." He promised he and Altman are "around the clock to talk to those with offers." But Chen made clear he has limits. "While I'll fight to keep every one of you, I won't do so at the price of fairness to others," he wrote. Staff may rest for a week, but leaders will stay working. Some inside believe the company has focused too much on launching new features. Chen wants them to return to the core goal. "We need to remain focused on the real prize of finding ways to compute (a lot more supercomputers are coming online later this year) into intelligence," he wrote. "This is the main quest, and it's important to remember that skirmishes with Meta are the side quest." Sam Altman backed him up in Slack. "It's been really amazing to watch Mark's leadership and integrity through this process, especially when he has had to make tough decisions. Very grateful we have him as our leader!" OpenAI has weathered crisis before, including Altman's brief firing last year. But the stakes now feel different. Some see the break as vital care. Others see it as damage control. One exhausted researcher posted, then deleted, a simple truth: this mission is not just code. It's people. And people burn out. While OpenAI asks staff to rest, Meta waits. And the world's AI race grinds on -- powered by human brains that need a moment to breathe.

OpenAI Says "Someone Has Broken Into Our Home" Amid Reports of Meta Poaching Talent; Now Plans to Reconsider Compensation

OpenAI has finally responded to the company's "talent drain," in particular due to the poaching attempts from Meta. Altman's AI startup is reportedly voicing for a "corporate burglary" it seems. Well, if you are unaware of the situation, Meta has adopted a more aggressive approach towards expanding its pool of AI talent, part of which is by luring in OpenAI's employees by providing them with massive compensation. It is reported that Mark Zuckerberg has offered more than $100 million in signing bonuses to some of the employees. Meta has been looking towards talent from Google, OpenAI, and even Anthropic, as the firm is now in a bid to regain its lead in the AI hype, and its recent investment into Scale AI is a prime example. Now, in an internal memo sent out by OpenAI's Chief Research Officer Mark Chen (via WIRED), he claims that the firm is aware of the poaching attempts by Meta, and says that the administration isn't sitting idly by at all. Here's what Chen had to say: I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something. Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by. We've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent. Well, poaching attempts from Meta made OpenAI realize how "under-treated" their employees are, and one of the bigger reasons for why Meta has been successful in their talent-grabbing measure is that OpenAI is reported to have extremely demanding conditions. The operational pace is said to be as high as 80-hour workweeks, with employees reporting significant fatigue and burnout. Apart from this, OpenAI's pursuit of transition from a mere "research lab" to a commercial entity has made many researchers feeling violated. OpenAI advises employees not to get caught up in the pressure of Meta's gigantic offers, insisting that they ignore the noise, but leaving out $100 million in just signing bonuses is a difficult step. OpenAI's executives are reportedly handling researchers individually and guiding them in case competitors approach with compelling offers. Chen has called Meta's offers a "side quest" and that the work OpenAI is doing is the real deal, which shows that efforts are being made to retain the top talent by any means.

Meta Pursues 'Superintelligence' With New OpenAI Hires, Stock Climbs To Fresh Highs - Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)

Meta Platforms Inc META shares soared to a new all-time high Monday morning, driven by investor enthusiasm following CEO Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious plans to restructure the company's artificial intelligence division. The move signals a deep commitment to developing "superintelligence," advanced AI systems capable of outperforming humans. What To Know: Per a Bloomberg report, this strategic pivot includes the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be spearheaded by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of the data-labeling startup Scale AI. Meta's focus on AI has been further solidified by a recent $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and the recruitment of top talent from rivals such as OpenAI and Google. These aggressive steps into the AI landscape have bolstered investor confidence in Meta's future growth potential. The company's recent significant investments in renewable energy to power its energy-intensive AI data centers have also been well-received. This comprehensive strategy, combining cutting-edge AI development with sustainable operational goals, has propelled Meta's share price to record highs in 2025. Analyst Ratings: Driven in part by the company's standout first-quarter financial results in April, Wall Street analysts have echoed the bullish sentiment, with several firms reiterating positive ratings and raising their price targets for Meta. In the last week of June alone, Piper Sandler reiterated its Overweight rating while significantly lifting its price target to $808. Similarly, UBS and Citigroup maintained their Buy ratings, increasing their price targets to $812 and $803, respectively. This wave of upward revisions from major financial institutions reflects a strong consensus that Meta's strategic initiatives, particularly in artificial intelligence, will continue to drive significant value for shareholders. Price Action: According to data from Benzinga Pro, META shares are trading marginally higher by 0.36% to $736.29 Monday afternoon. The stock has a 52-week high of $747.90 and a 52-week low of $442.65. META stock is also higher by some 25% in the second quarter of 2025. Read Also: Mark Zuckerberg Hated 'The Social Network' Film: Don't Tell Him A Sequel Is Coming How To Buy META Stock Besides going to a brokerage platform to purchase a share - or fractional share - of stock, you can also gain access to shares either by buying an exchange traded fund (ETF) that holds the stock itself, or by allocating yourself to a strategy in your 401(k) that would seek to acquire shares in a mutual fund or other instrument. For example, in Meta Platforms' case, it is in the Communication Services sector. An ETF will likely hold shares in many liquid and large companies that help track that sector, allowing an investor to gain exposure to the trends within that segment. Image: Shutterstock METAMeta Platforms Inc$735.510.26%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum87.17Growth92.07Quality87.98Value24.43Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Meta Super Intelligence Labs : Zuckerberg's Vision for the Future of AI

What if the future of artificial intelligence wasn't just about smarter chatbots or faster algorithms, but a bold leap toward creating machines that could think, reason, and innovate beyond human capabilities? This isn't a sci-fi fantasy -- it's the audacious vision Mark Zuckerberg has set in motion with Meta's latest initiative. With the establishment of Meta Super Intelligence Labs (MSL), Zuckerberg is betting big on achieving "super intelligence," a level of AI that could redefine industries, reshape economies, and challenge the very fabric of human ingenuity. But this isn't just another tech announcement -- it's a high-stakes power play in a fiercely competitive race, where the rewards are immense, and the risks are equally staggering. Matthew Berman takes you through how Meta plans to outpace rivals like OpenAI and Google by assembling a dream team of AI pioneers, using billion-dollar acquisitions, and pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve. From the recruitment of Alexander Wang, a visionary leader in AI infrastructure, to the strategic acquisition of Scale AI, Meta's moves are as calculated as they are disruptive. But what does this mean for the future of AI -- and for us? As the race for super intelligence heats up, the implications go far beyond technology, touching on ethics, societal impact, and the balance of power in the tech world. Prepare to explore the strategies, stakes, and seismic shifts that could define the next era of innovation. Meta Super Intelligence Labs (MSL) represents a pivotal step in Meta's pursuit of AI excellence. This division is tasked with developing advanced AI models and multimodal systems designed to push the limits of current technology. The goal is to create systems that can seamlessly integrate and process diverse types of data, such as text, images, and video, to deliver new applications. To lead this initiative, Meta appointed Alexander Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, as Chief AI Officer. Wang's extensive expertise in large-scale AI systems and data infrastructure positions him as a key figure in Meta's strategy. His leadership is expected to accelerate the development of next-generation AI technologies, solidifying Meta's position as a leader in the field. By focusing on innovative research and innovation, MSL aims to set new benchmarks for AI capabilities. Meta has adopted an aggressive approach to attract the brightest minds in AI. The company is actively targeting researchers and engineers from competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Reports indicate that Meta has offered highly competitive compensation packages, including signing bonuses reaching up to $100 million, to secure top-tier talent. This strategy underscores Meta's commitment to assembling a world-class team capable of driving innovation. The recruitment efforts focus on experts who have contributed to significant advancements in AI, such as the development of GPT models and multimodal systems. By bringing these individuals on board, Meta aims to accelerate its progress toward achieving super intelligence. This talent acquisition strategy not only strengthens Meta's internal capabilities but also disrupts the competitive landscape by drawing expertise away from rival organizations. Here is a selection of other guides from our extensive library of content you may find of interest on super intelligence. A cornerstone of Meta's strategy is its acquisition of a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14 billion. This investment provides Meta with access to Scale AI's advanced data infrastructure and engineering expertise, which are critical for developing sophisticated AI systems. The partnership also assists the integration of Scale AI's resources into Meta's broader AI initiatives, enhancing its ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data efficiently. Alexander Wang's transition from Scale AI to lead Meta Super Intelligence Labs highlights the strategic importance of this acquisition. His dual role as a former leader of Scale AI and current Chief AI Officer at Meta ensures a seamless collaboration between the two entities. This synergy is expected to accelerate the development of innovative AI solutions, positioning Meta as a frontrunner in the race for super intelligence. Meta's assertive recruitment and strategic moves have posed significant challenges for OpenAI. In response, OpenAI has implemented measures to retain its talent pool, including enhanced compensation packages and initiatives aimed at boosting employee morale. These efforts reflect the growing competition for expertise in the AI sector, where retaining top talent is critical to maintaining a competitive edge. Additionally, OpenAI's leadership is reevaluating its long-term strategies to adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape. This includes exploring new partnerships, optimizing resource allocation, and prioritizing projects that align with its mission. The rivalry between Meta and OpenAI underscores the high stakes involved in the development of advanced AI technologies and their potential impact on society. Meta's ultimate goal is to achieve super intelligence, a level of AI capability that surpasses human intelligence across multiple domains. To realize this vision, the company is using its vast financial resources, strategic acquisitions, and aggressive recruitment tactics. This approach contrasts with OpenAI's more constrained operations as a private entity, highlighting the advantages of scale and funding in the race for AI dominance. The competition between Meta and OpenAI is emblematic of the broader struggle among tech giants to lead the AI revolution. As Meta accelerates its efforts, the implications for AI development extend beyond technological advancements. The pursuit of super intelligence raises critical questions about ethics, societal impact, and the balance of power in the tech industry. These considerations will shape not only the future of AI but also its role in addressing global challenges and opportunities. Mark Zuckerberg's initiative to establish Meta as a leader in super intelligence represents a fantastic moment in the AI industry. Through the creation of Meta Super Intelligence Labs, the acquisition of Scale AI, and the recruitment of top talent, Meta is positioning itself as a formidable competitor in the race for AI supremacy. The outcomes of this initiative will influence the trajectory of AI development, shaping its applications in areas such as healthcare, education, and business. As the competition intensifies, the broader implications for society become increasingly significant. The strategies employed by Meta and its rivals will determine how AI evolves, who controls its development, and how its benefits are distributed. This dynamic underscores the importance of balancing innovation with ethical considerations, making sure that the advancements in AI serve the greater good while addressing potential risks and challenges.

Meta spending big on AI talent but will it pay off?

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are spending billions of dollars for top talent to make up ground in the generative artificial intelligence race, sparking doubt about the wisdom of the spree. OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently lamented that Meta has offered $100 million bonuses to engineers who jump to Zuckerberg's ship, where hefty salaries await. A few OpenAI employees have reportedly taken Meta up on the offer, joining Scale AI founder and former chief executive Alexandr Wang at the Menlo Park-based tech titan.

Meta's Superintelligence Lab Wants To Outthink The World -- And Scale AI DNA Is All Over It - Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)

Meta Platforms, Inc. META CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a decisive move to reshape the company's entire AI strategy by consolidating all artificial intelligence efforts under a newly formed division called Meta Superintelligence Labs. The restructuring aims to drive Meta toward its goal of creating superintelligence -- AI systems that surpass human cognitive abilities. Read Next: What Happened With Apple Stock Today? Unified AI Leadership and Vision Leading the new Superintelligence Labs is Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder and former CEO of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta's Chief AI Officer. Wang, known for building Scale AI into a critical infrastructure provider for training data powering major AI models like ChatGPT, brings a fresh perspective rather than a traditional academic background. Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, will co-lead product development and applied research efforts. All artificial intelligence units will be housed in Superintelligence Labs and will report directly to Zuckerberg, underscoring the CEO's personal commitment to steering Meta's AI future. Strategic Investments and Talent Acquisition Meta's aggressive push into AI also includes its previous $14.3 billion investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI which secured Wang's leadership. The company also aggressively recruited top AI talent from industry leaders such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic. Zuckerberg has been deeply involved in recruitment and reportedly hosted meetings at his homes and offered lucrative compensation packages, including $100 million signing bonuses. Leveraging Open-Source and In-House Innovations Meta's AI efforts will heavily rely on the open-source Llama 3 models and proprietary MTIA chips, designed to reduce reliance on costly NVIDIA hardware, in order to optimize performance and cost-efficiency as Meta scales its AI infrastructure. A Vision for the Future Zuckerberg told employees in an internal memo obtained by CNBC on Monday that the new approach and talent will allow Meta to "deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence to the world." "Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world. We have a strong business that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs. We have deeper experience building and growing products that reach billions of people," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. Read Next: SoFi Stock Gets Supercharged With Return To Crypto Image: Shutterstock METAMeta Platforms Inc$729.34-1.19%Stock Score Locked: Want to See it? Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Reveal Full ScoreEdge RankingsMomentum87.54Growth92.10Quality87.67Value23.92Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewMarket News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Meta Restructures AI Division, Launches Superintelligence Labs

Company hires 11 elite researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a sweeping reorganization of the company's artificial intelligence (AI) division, forming a new unit called Meta Superintelligence Labs. The group will be dedicated to developing AI systems with capabilities surpassing those of humans, a move Zuckerberg described as "the beginning of a new era for humanity." Also Read: Expect Artificial Super Intelligence by 2035, Says SoftBank CEO Leading the newly established division is Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI. Wang has been appointed Meta's Chief AI Officer following Meta's USD 14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier this month. Zuckerberg called Wang "the most impressive founder of his generation" in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg. Joining Wang in a leadership role is Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub. Friedman will co-lead the group, overseeing AI product development and applied research initiatives. Also Read: Meta Plans to Invest up to USD 65 Billion in AI in 2025 "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo to employees, according to the report. "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." The restructuring comes amid intensifying competition in the AI sector, with Meta racing against companies such as OpenAI and Google. Zuckerberg has made AI Meta's top strategic focus in 2025, channeling investments into computing infrastructure, chips, data centers, research talent, and startup acquisitions. Also Read: Apple Eyes Generative AI to Accelerate Custom Chip Design, Says Senior Executive In addition to the leadership overhaul, Meta has made a series of high-profile talent acquisitions. The company announced 11 new hires from leading AI research labs, including former DeepMind scientists Jack Rae and Pei Sun; OpenAI researchers Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren; and Joel Pobar from Anthropic, who previously worked at Meta for over a decade. Meta has also engaged in acquisition talks with AI startups Perplexity AI and Runway AI, and is expected to acquire PlayAI, a company focused on AI-generated voice replication technology, according to the report.

Meta Reportedly Hires Away 3 Researchers From OpenAI | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, all stationed with OpenAI's Zurich office, have been hired by the social media giant for its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts, the Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday (June 25), citing sources familiar with the matter. The report noted that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally campaigning to hire new AI expertise to bolster his company's flagging AI efforts. In some cases, that has meant offering $100 million to researchers willing to join Meta's team working on artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI that can perform tasks at or above the level of humans. Meta also recently invested $14 billion in AI startup Scale and brought its CEO Alexandr Wang on board to oversee the new team. According to the WSJ, Zuckerberg has also tried to recruit OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, though both have declined. The report also pointed out that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said onstage at an event earlier this week that he wasn't concerned about Zuckerberg's efforts to poach his team. "It's like OK, Zuckerberg is doing some new insane thing. What's next?" he said. Altman also recently said his best people hadn't departed for Meta. As covered here earlier this week, Zuckerberg has reportedly approached numerous high-profile AI companies about possible acquisitions. In addition to Scale, those startups include Perplexity, Runway, Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence, the latter two founded by former top executives at OpenAI. And as PYMNTS noted, it's not only Meta trying to beef up its AI roster. "The recruitment push comes at a time when competition for skilled AI talent has reached a fever pitch, with companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and Anthropic vying for the same pool of geniuses," the report said. The heightened focus on AI talent is also happening as Meta wants to expand the capabilities of its Llama AI model and integrate advanced AI into its products. The company's AI-driven features now power everything from content recommendations on Instagram to conversational assistants in WhatsApp. The company is also exploring AI agents to enhance customer service and commerce across its platforms.

Meta's Recent AI Hires to Lead New 'Superintelligence Labs' Unit | PYMNTS.com

The new unit will include teams working on Meta's foundation models, product, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and the next generation of its models, according to the report. "I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort," Zuckerberg said in the memo, per the report. "We're still forming this group and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well." Meta did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. It was reported June 10 that Zuckerberg was personally recruiting experts for Meta's artificial general intelligence (AGI) team, recruiting from a pool of AI researchers and engineers who had met with him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, California. Zuckerberg had been clear about making AI a priority for Meta, but had recently gone into "founder mode," with a hands-on approach to management, the June 10 report said. It was reported June 18 that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses to poach his workers as it tried to catch up in the AI race. Scale AI, which is a data-labeling startup, announced June 12 that it had received a "significant investment" from Meta and that Wang would join Meta while also continuing to serve as a director on Scale's board of directors. It was reported June 18 that Meta was in talks to hire Friedman and Daniel Gross, who are AI investors, and partially buy out their venture capital fund, NFDG, which has invested in AI startups like Perplexity, The Bot Company and Safe Superintelligence. According to Monday's CNBC report, Meta hired both Friedman and Gross.

Meta deepens AI push with 'Superintelligence' lab, Reuters source says

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganized the company's artificial intelligence efforts under a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to a source on Monday. The division will be headed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI. He will be the chief AI officer of the new initiative at the social media giant, the source said. The high-stakes push follows senior staff departures and a poor reception for Meta's latest open-source Llama 4 model, challenges that have allowed rivals including Google, OpenAI and China's DeepSeek to seize momentum in the AI race. Zuckerberg hopes the new lab will fast-track work on artificial general intelligence - machines that can outthink humans - and help create new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses. Over the past month, Zuckerberg personally led an aggressive talent raid, floating offers for startups including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and courting prospects directly on WhatsApp with million-dollar pay packages. Earlier this month, the Facebook and Instagram parent invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Apart from Wang and some Scale AI staff, the new division will reportedly include SSI's co-founder and CEO, Daniel Gross. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the Superintelligence Labs with Wang and head the company's work on AI products and applied research, according to the source. Zuckerberg has also brought on 11 new hires in the AI field, including researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the source said. The new appointments include former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun; several OpenAI alumni such as Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren; as well as Anthropic's Joel Pobar, who previously spent more than a decade at Meta, according to the source. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them. But some analysts worry that Meta's AGI bet could be another moonshot to yield near-term returns. Its other big bet, the Reality Labs unit, has burned through more than $60 billion since 2020, with little to show beyond the Ray-Ban smart glasses and Quest headsets. Together, big tech companies are expected to spend $320 billion on AI this year. In 2024, Microsoft spent $650 million to scoop up most of Inflection AI's staff, including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, while Amazon poached key talent from Adept. Yet the finish line for AGI remains elusive: Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has said current methods will not be enough to reach the holy grail of the technology, while SoftBank's Masayoshi Son pegs the breakthrough within a decade.

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg unveils AI 'Superintelligence Labs' in...

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg on Monday unveiled a restructuring of the company's AI operations as it pursues what he dubbed "superintelligence," - and Wall Street cheered by pushing the stock to another all-time high. Zuckerberg, 41, told employees that the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs will be spearheaded by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who joined the Big Tech giant after Zuckerberg spent nearly $15 billion for a 49% stake in the startup. "As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight," Zuckerberg said in an internal message to employees first obtained by Bloomberg. A Meta source confirmed the report. "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," he added. Zuckerberg said Wang, who will serve as chief AI officer, was the "most impressive founder of his generation," according to the memo. Wang will work close with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who will oversee AI products and applied research. Investors sent the Facebook and Instagram parent to as high as $747.90 in intraday trading, before dipping down to about $738 a share, up 0.6%, as of 3:15 p.m. ET. The company set its previous high of $733.63 on Friday and is up 23% YTD, putting its valuation at approximately $1.86 trillion -- the sixth-most in the world. Meta is competing against the likes of Google and Sam Altman's OpenAI in the race to develop advanced AI. Zuckerberg favors an "open-source" AI model, meaning that they are publicly available for anyone to use, while Google and OpenAI each have closed-source models. In his memo, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta had poached four more OpenAI researchers - Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren. In total, the billionaire announced 11 new hires, including ex-employees of rivals Google and Anthropic. Altman has publicly grumbled about Zuckerberg's recruiting push - claiming on a podcast earlier this month that the Facebook founder had offered $100 million signing bonuses in its efforts to lure OpenAI talent. Top Meta executive Andrew Bosworth reportedly pushed back during a recent all-hands meeting, telling employees that Altman was being "dishonest" about the extent of the offers. Another former OpenAI researcher Lucas Beyer recently confirmed in an X post that he and colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai were lured away by Zuckerberg. However, Byers noted that the trio "did not get 100M sign-on, that's fake news." Key OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal - a main contributor to OpenAI's first-ever AI reasoning model o1 - has also joined Meta.

Meta deepens AI push with 'Superintelligence' lab, source says

(Reuters) -Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganized the company's artificial intelligence efforts under a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to a source on Monday. The division will be headed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI. He will be the chief AI officer of the new initiative at the social media giant, the source said. The high-stakes push follows senior staff departures and a poor reception for Meta's latest open-source Llama 4 model, challenges that have allowed rivals including Google, OpenAI and China's DeepSeek to seize momentum in the AI race. Zuckerberg hopes the new lab will fast-track work on artificial general intelligence - machines that can outthink humans - and help create new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses. Over the past month, Zuckerberg personally led an aggressive talent raid, floating offers for startups including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and courting prospects directly on WhatsApp with million-dollar pay packages. Earlier this month, the Facebook and Instagram parent invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. Apart from Wang and some Scale AI staff, the new division will reportedly include SSI's co-founder and CEO, Daniel Gross. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead the Superintelligence Labs with Wang and head the company's work on AI products and applied research, according to the source. Zuckerberg has also brought on 11 new hires in the AI field, including researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the source said. The new appointments include former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun; several OpenAI alumni such as Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren; as well as Anthropic's Joel Pobar, who previously spent more than a decade at Meta, according to the source. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta had offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them. But some analysts worry that Meta's AGI bet could be another moonshot to yield near-term returns. Its other big bet, the Reality Labs unit, has burned through more than $60 billion since 2020, with little to show beyond the Ray-Ban smart glasses and Quest headsets. Together, big tech companies are expected to spend $320 billion on AI this year. In 2024, Microsoft spent $650 million to scoop up most of Inflection AI's staff, including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, while Amazon poached key talent from Adept. Yet the finish line for AGI remains elusive: Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has said current methods will not be enough to reach the holy grail of the technology, while SoftBank's Masayoshi Son pegs the breakthrough within a decade. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)

OpenAI to shut down for a week as Meta tries to poach top talent

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering massive compensation packages, including up to $100 million in signing bonuses, to lure OpenAI staff. OpenAI is shutting down operations for a week to give its employees a much-needed break amid growing pressure from rival Meta, which is aggressively trying to recruit the AI company's top researchers. The move comes after Meta recently managed to lure away four senior researchers from OpenAI to join its superintelligence lab. In an internal memo to employees, OpenAI's chief research officer Mark Chen compared the situation to a break-in. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote, according to Wired. He assured staff that he, CEO Sam Altman and other leaders are working "around the clock" to respond to Meta's offers and retain key talent. Also read: Apple may let ChatGPT and Anthropic power Siri amid internal AI setbacks Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering massive compensation packages, including up to $100 million in signing bonuses, to lure OpenAI staff. Chen's message made it clear that while OpenAI is actively working to retain staff by reviewing compensation and rewards, the company also wants to remain fair. "While I'll fight to keep every one of you, I won't do so at the price of fairness to others," he wrote. Several other OpenAI leaders also encouraged employees not to give in to pressure from Meta. One leader stated, "If they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, it's not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision." Also read: Apple may launch its most affordable MacBook yet with iPhone chip: Here's what we know As OpenAI staff deal with heavy workloads, often stretching to 80 hours a week, the upcoming break is seen as a way to help employees recharge. However, executives will continue working through the shutdown, and they worry Meta might use the pause to boost its recruitment efforts. OpenAI's decision to temporarily pause operations highlights both the intense pressure its staff faces and its commitment to supporting their well-being. With Meta's aggressive hiring tactics in play, the coming weeks could prove crucial for OpenAI's future direction and stability.

Meta and Mark Zuckerberg bet big on AI Superintelligence: Here's how

Mark Zuckerberg wants to democratize AI superintelligence for all When news broke last week that Mark Zuckerberg had splashed "up to $100 million" signing bonuses on top AI talent (from the likes of OpenAI and others), little did the tech world realize something seismic was underway within Meta. No longer content with tinkering with our social media feeds or developing virtual reality headsets, Mark Zuckerberg isn't just stopping at Llama for what he's set his sights on in terms of AI. No sir! In a clear signal of intent, Mark Zuckerberg has formally launched Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), which the Meta CEO is calling as a centralized unit (with some of the most talented AI developers on the planet) aimed at delivering "personal superintelligence for everyone." Here's what Mark Zuckerberg is aiming to do, based on this announcement. In his internal company memo released on June 30, Mark Zuckerberg didn't just move company personnel here and there, but he actually revealed how serious he is about gathering the best AI minds under one roof - under Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang now serves as Meta's Chief AI Officer, co-heading MSL alongside Nat Friedman, GitHub's ex-chief. Behind them stands a veritable who's who of AI luminaries - Trapit Bansal, Shuchao Bi, Huiwen Chang, Ji Lin, Jack Rae, and more - plucked straight from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Research with eye-watering sign-on packages. According to unconfirmed reports, several recent Meta arrivals commanded bonuses approaching nine figures - in US dollars, yes. Also read: Mark Zuckerberg says AI will write most of Meta's AI code by 2026 With all this spending, the message couldn't be any clearer... that Mark Zuckerberg is channeling founder-mode zeal once again within Meta. And by unifying the erstwhile frontier AI research group within Meta, different product teams, with a new "talent-dense" frontier lab under MSL, Meta wants to remove internal silos and turbocharge both foundational AI research and its rapid productization. Concurrently, Zuckerberg has also greenlit a parallel "small lab" to chase next-generation superintelligent architectures. This will directly leverage Meta's huge AI compute war chest, touted at over $68 billion in planned AI spending, and not to mention their 49% stake in Scale AI. Mark Zuckerberg's betting that this twin approach of 1) optimizing today's products while 2) sprinting toward tomorrow's frontier, will ultimately help Meta outpace rivals who focus solely on one horizon or the other. While Mark Zuckerberg continues spending the big bucks on acquiring cutting-edge AI talent, Meta's existing battleground lies in Llama 4.1 and 4.2, which are the foundational engines behind Meta AI's billion-strong user base. Thanks to the Meta Superintelligence Labs, be sure to expect iterative releases of the latest AI into Meta's products. Where it continues to be tightly integrated into Messenger, WhatsApp, and immersive AI glasses, and improved multimodal capabilities across the board. Also read: Mark Zuckerberg says Apple has not invented anything new since Steve Jobs unveiled first iPhone In all of this, scale is Meta's secret weapon. With more than a billion MAUs already touching Meta AI, each interaction generates data that fine-tunes model performance, user experience, and novel capabilities - whether its context-aware assistants in Instagram or real-time translation in WhatsApp calls. Mark Zuckerberg's envisioning a world where your Meta glasses anticipate your needs before you even have to ask, where AI agents streamline every aspect of daily life from content creation to complex decision-making. By weaving superintelligent threads into its massive social graph and ad engine, Meta plans to unleash the full power of AI, sidestepping the scarcity mindset of smaller labs and the "lean startup" constraints of OpenAI. For Meta and Zuckerberg, this is about embedding intelligence at an unprecedented scale - an "AI for all" ethos backed by computing infrastructure few can rival in the world. Whether Mark Zuckerberg has overpaid for AI talent and will Meta Superintelligence Lab's grand experiment truly outpace rivals remains to be seen. Just like their quest to turn AI superintelligence from an elusive sci-fi dream into an everyday Meta feature. Only time - and tens of billions in compute and talent investment - will tell if this is AI vision or insanity.