Meta's $72B AI Infrastructure Investment Signals Shift to 'Personal Superintelligence'

Meta to spend up to $72B on AI infrastructure in 2025 as compute arms race escalates

Meta is pouring money into the physical and technical infrastructure needed to scale its AI ambitions. The company said Wednesday in its second-quarter earnings report that it plans to more than double its spend on building AI infrastructure, like data centers and servers. "We currently expect 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $66-72 billion...up approximately $30 billion year-over-year at the midpoint," Meta said. That's an aggressive capex growth, and one that Meta plans to continue onwards to 2026. The company said it expects a similarly large increase in spend on AI infrastructure next year as the company continues to "aggressively [pursue] opportunities to bring additional capacity online to meet the needs of [its] artificial intelligence efforts and business operations." "We expect that developing leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences, so we expect to ramp our investments significantly in 2026 to support that work," said Susan Li, Meta CFO, during the company's Wednesday earnings call. Meta has announced two major AI "titan clusters." The first is Prometheus in Ohio, which is poised to be among the first AI superclusters to hit 1 gigawatt of compute power when it comes online in 2026. Then there's Hyperion, a cluster in Louisiana that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has bragged would have a footprint the size of Manhattan and could scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years. On top of those, Meta has several other unnamed titan-scale clusters underway. Meta's data center projects promise to soak up enough energy to power millions of homes, pulling that electricity from nearby communities. One of the company's projects in Newton County, Georgia, has already caused the water taps to run dry in some residents' homes. Meta also noted in its earnings report that it expects its second-largest driver of growth to be employee compensation as the company spends millions, and possibly even billions, to poach talented AI engineers and researchers to work for Meta's newly formed business unit, Superintelligence Labs. Before earnings, Zuckerberg shared his vision for "personal superintelligence," the idea that AI should help individual people live their best lives, mainly through the medium of Meta's smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Meta's stock surged 10% in after-hours as investors responded to Meta's overall performance in the quarter and better-than-expected outlook for the third quarter. Meta reported revenue of $47.5 billion in the second quarter, with expectations to hit between $47.5 billion and $50.5 billion in Q3. Advertising drove Meta's revenue gains, fueled by AI tools -- like AI-powered translations and video generation -- to help advertisers create more meaningful and targeted campaigns. The company's Reality Labs segment, however, saw a $4.5 billion loss.

Meta's AI Recruiting Campaign Finds a New Target

Mark Zuckerberg is on a warpath to recruit top talent in the AI field for his newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs. After trying to gut OpenAI (and successfully poaching several top researchers), he appears to have set his sights on his next target. More than a dozen people at Mira Murati's 50-person startup, Thinking Machines Lab, have been approached or received offers from the tech giant. (Murati, for those who don't remember, was previously the chief technology officer at OpenAI.) One of those offers was more than $1 billion over a multi-year span, a source with knowledge of the negotiations tells WIRED. The rest were between $200 million and $500 million over a four-year span, multiple sources confirm. In the first year alone, some staffers were guaranteed to make between $50 million and $100 million, sources say (a spokesperson for the lab declined to comment). So far at Thinking Machines Lab, not a single person has taken the offer. Meta communications director Andy Stone disputed this reporting in a statement to WIRED. "We made offers only to a handful of people at TML and while there was one sizable offer, the details are off," he said. "At the end of the day, this all begs the question who is spinning this narrative and why." Zuckerberg's initial outreach is low-key, according to messages viewed by WIRED. In some cases, he sent recruits a direct message on WhatsApp asking to talk. From there, the interviews move fast -- a long call with the CEO himself, followed by conversations with chief technology officer Andrew "Boz" Bosworth and other Meta executives. Here's a pre-Meta Superintelligence Labs recruiting message Zuckerberg sent to a potential recruit (the tone hasn't changed much today): "We've been following your work on advancing technology and the benefits of AI for everyone over the years. We're making some important investments across research, products and our infrastructure in order to build the most valuable AI products and services for people. We're optimistic that everyone who uses our services will have a world-class AI assistant to help get things done, every creator will have an AI their community can engage with, every business will have an AI their customers can interact with to buy things and get support, and every developer will have a state-of-the-art open source model to build with. We want to bring the best people to Meta, and we would love to share more about what we are building." During these conversations, Boz has been upfront about his vision for how Meta will compete with OpenAI. While the tech giant has lagged behind its smaller competitor in building cutting-edge models, it is willing to use its open source strategy to undercut OpenAI, sources say. The idea is that Meta can commoditize the technology by releasing open source models that directly compete with the ChatGPT maker. "The pressure has always been there since the start of this year, and I think we saw that culminate with Llama 4 being rushed out of the door," a source at Meta tells me. The rollout of Meta's latest family of models was delayed due to struggles improving its performance, and once it was released, there was a lot of drama about the company appearing to game a benchmark to make other models appear better than they actually were.

Mark Zuckerberg Details Meta's Plan for Self-Improving, Superintelligent AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that his new research lab will focus on building AI models that can learn with minimal human input. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs is focused on building AI models that can self-improve -- meaning they can learn from themselves without as much human input. The remarks came during a second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. "At some level, [it's] not just going to be learning from people, because you want to build something that is fundamentally smarter than people," Zuckerberg said. "So...you're going to develop a way for it to improve itself. That is a very fundamental thing that's going to have broad implications for how we build products and how we run the company." It's one of a handful of comments the CEO has made during the past 12 hours that gesture at how Meta's new research lab plans to compete with rivals like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. Early this morning, Zuckerberg posted a letter online and shared a video to Instagram Reels in which he said that Meta's superintelligence efforts would center on building "personal superintelligence" that would give people tools for their own empowerment and to better the world. "This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output," he said. Another key piece of Meta's AI strategy is smartglasses, which Zuckerberg said he believes "are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI." Since they debuted in 2023, Meta has sold two million pairs of smart sunglasses made in partnership with Ray-Ban. Last September, the company showed off a futuristic prototype of augmented reality glasses, too. (The prototype, called Orion, isn't expected to ship to consumers, but Meta has said it plans to build new devices over the next few years based on Orion research.) For now, Meta appears to be making some distinction between AI that powers the monetization of its core products, like Instagram and WhatsApp, and superintelligent AI that could one day help power humanity's future. Zuckerberg's remarks about superintelligence came on the heels of a better-than-expected earnings report. The company, which has lagged behind its competitors in the AI race, is spending billions of dollars to build out a small but mighty superintelligence lab that will focus on building frontier AI models. Since publicly announcing the lab last month, Meta has been on an aggressive recruiting spree, bringing in key Silicon Valley operatives like Alexandr Wang, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and offering AI researchers compensation packages as high as nine figures in order to lure them over to the lab. Wang was a part of an "acqu-hire" deal struck with Scale AI, an AI data-labeling startup that he cofounded. Former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao has been named the head of Meta's new research lab. Meta revised its expectations for its capital expenditures for the year, increasing its forecast to $69 billion. Employee compensation is one of the biggest drivers of that, Meta's chief financial officer Susan Li has said, as well as AI infrastructure. Despite the amount the company is spending on building out its AI products, it's also forecasting a better-than-expected outlook for the third quarter, anticipating between $47.5 billion and $50.5 billion in revenue.

Meta: So Long Metaverse. Hello Superintelligence.

When Facebook, Inc. famously changed its name to Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021, it cemented that the behemoth social media company was now an emerging "metaverse company." There was just one problem: the vast majority of people didn't care about the metaverse. Meta struggled to demonstrate tangible value with the metaverse -- hemorrhaging money and, in a way, facing a bit of an existential crisis following the company's pivot. Quarter-after-quarter we heard less and less about the metaverse and more and more about AI. In fact, "how AI is transforming everything we do" is the major theme for Meta in 2023 -- and rightfully so. Not only has Meta made demonstrable strides with AI, but it's helping to future proof itself as a growth company should its family of apps get affected by the current anti-trust case or changing social media sentiment. According to Forrester's 2025 Media And Marketing Survey, 52% of US online adults indicate they feel more negatively about social media now versus a year ago. Leading up to Meta's Q2 earnings call (later today), Mark Zuckerberg shed more light on the company's superintelligence ambitions -- a capstone that's symbolic of Meta's ongoing reinvention from a social media company to a metaverse company to, now, a super-intelligence company. Zuckerberg said: To do this requires the best of the best talent. And Meta's been on a tear when it comes to recruiting top AI talent. If Meta leapfrogs the superintelligence race, it's because of its deep pockets. Yes, money talks, and Meta is spending lots of it to lure luminaries from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Apple with lavish compensation packages while also spending hundreds of billions on data centers to power and scale its AI initiatives. Meta's CEO is hopeful that superintelligence will be used to empower people and not "focused on replacing large swaths of society." But let's be real: human replacement is already happening, and this is just the beginning. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, "CEOs are shrinking their workforces -- and they couldn't be prouder." Forrester data continues to corroborate this -- in that business leaders see AI as an efficiency play above all else. The fact is that AI can save companies' time and money. That's a good thing for shareholder value. But will it be good for society? As with every major technology disruption some good will come from it... but also some bad. How bad the impact of superintelligence gets depends, in part, on the ethics of the companies developing it. Meta says it "will need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source." But many companies are vying feverously to win the superintelligence race. But at what cost are they willing to do so? Mere trust in companies to do the right thing just isn't going to cut it.

What Zuckerberg's 'personal superintelligence' sales pitch leaves out

Superintelligence may disrupt jobs despite efficiency promises. Another day, another vague reference to the promise of superintelligence. On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a video address and accompanying letter on X stating his company's "vision for the future of personal superintelligence for everyone." Also: How Meta's new AI chatbot could strike up a conversation with you Zuckerberg coined that term -- without actually defining it -- earlier this month, when Meta announced its new Superintelligence Labs, a division within the company dedicated to building a computer system that significantly surpasses human capability. Superintelligence would leapfrog artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would be theoretically comparable to the human brain. Both remain deeply hypothetical. Also: Is AI overhyped or underhyped? 6 tips to separate fact from fiction In the letter, Zuckerberg references recent advancements in agentic AI, noting that systems are slowly but surely "improving themselves," and claims that superintelligence is more possible than ever -- something we've heard before. Still, for every advancement, there is usually a limitation. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," writes Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg's message refrains from clarifying what a personal AI product or service could be. Regardless, he is optimistic it will free the industry from the automation trap. "If trends continue, then you'd expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting," he says. It's unclear whether that trend has actually begun, though, considering how Jevon's Paradox -- the theory that efficiency only begets more consumption, not freedom -- appears to be playing out. Also: I've worn the Meta Ray-Bans for half a year, and these 5 features still amaze me "Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful," his letter continues. "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices." The Information reported on Monday that Meta's smart glasses sales have more than tripled in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Perhaps for good reason; ZDNET senior AI editor Sabrina Ortiz recently noted in our AI newsletter that smart glasses are, in her opinion, the most successful vehicle for effective personal AI. Amidst the optimism, Zuckerberg noted the already-present reality that AI will disrupt many parts of society, including the job market -- and that how we'll apply superintelligence remains to be seen (if or when it is realized). "The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society," he writes. Also: Open-source skills can save your career when AI comes knocking Zuckerberg's vision expands on the current argument for why AI agents are useful. At their most efficient, agents take up the busywork that can claim much of a human worker's day, automating the mundane so employees can focus on higher-level, more singular contributions. That's precisely because agents are broadly less capable than humans, especially when it comes to tasks like original creative work, relationship management, negotiation, and understanding certain contexts. But the whole premise of superintelligence is that it would far exceed what the human brain can do. How Zuckerberg maintains this is possible while also assuring it would not displace people themselves will remain logically opaque until we have concrete examples. Also: 5 entry-level tech jobs AI is already augmenting, according to Amazon This feels especially relevant in the context of work, where AI's agentic impact is unsettling job security. Microsoft just completed a third round of layoffs this year, ostensibly thanks to AI, and policy has yet to specify worker protections for those at risk of being replaced by the technology, instead favoring tax breaks for upskilling initiatives. Meta itself is in the process of laying off 5% of its workforce this year, following 21,000 total layoffs since 2022, according to Business Insider. As is the case at other companies, the layoffs are at least partially due to redirecting funds into AI development. It's unclear whether these roles at Meta will eventually also be replaced by AI. In what could be seen as a strategic investment plea, Zuckerberg assured the public that, despite offering no specifics, Meta can be trusted with the huge responsibility of shepherding whatever "personal superintelligence" is toward humanity's best interests -- unlike other AI companies. "We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives," his letter says, noting that Meta is "distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output." "At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture," he says. Also: Control your computer with your mind? Meta's working on that It's unclear how this approach to a still-unrealized power will fit with the company's past business decisions. In April, for example, Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, formerly the company's director of global policy, testified that Meta shared data with advertisers about when users, including teens, felt most "worthless or helpless." While double-speak isn't surprising coming from the world's most powerful CEOs, Zuckerberg's message is a worthwhile reminder that, in their relatively brief history, tech companies have yet to commit their technology to the betterment of the human condition over profits. In carefully promising nothing but asking for the public's trust, the message leaves uncertain who Zuckerberg's idealized future is particularly for -- especially in an increasingly deregulated policy environment.

Meta's Zuckerberg outlines vision for 'personal superintelligence' in a letter -- says that, unlike rivals, his approach isn't about automating everything

Mark Zuckerberg has spent the better part of a decade chasing new computing frontiers, from VR to the metaverse. But today, the Meta CEO staked his next big bet on what he calls "personal superintelligence." Unlike past efforts, this one isn't just about virtual spaces or avatars: It's about building AI that feels like an extension of yourself, and it's going to require some of the most powerful hardware stacks on the planet. In an open letter published just hours before Meta's Q2 2025 earnings call, Zuckerberg laid out his AI vision in deliberately human-centric terms. "This is not about automating all valuable work," he wrote. "It's about empowering individuals with intelligence tailored to their lives." That's a subtle jab at OpenAI's and Google's increasingly centralized AI strategies -- ones that push AGI as a force of mass replacement rather than augmentation. But make no mistake: despite the philosophical packaging, Zuckerberg's latest pivot is as much about compute as it is about ideology. In the past few months alone, Meta has funneled billions into AI R&D, recruiting top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. The new Meta Superintelligence Labs -- headed by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang -- will reportedly be responsible for developing foundation models such as Llama, alongside deeper research into AI architecture and inference. Of course, running those models at scale requires more than talent: it demands infrastructure. Lots of it. Sources close to Meta's datacenter expansion say the company is already deploying custom accelerators in limited workloads alongside traditional NVIDIA H100s and A100s. Meanwhile, there's speculation that Meta may be co-developing AI silicon in-house for future iterations of its Llama-based models, echoing Google's TPU strategy. At the very least, Meta has ramped up its own MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator) program, with next-gen silicon rumored to be taped out later this year. Whether these chips will directly power "personal superintelligence" experiences remains unclear. But if Meta plans to deliver real-time, private AI companions at the edge or in VR devices, rather than purely cloud-delivered interactions, the hardware stack will need to be both extremely fast and extremely efficient. This isn't Zuckerberg's first grand vision, by far. Back in 2021, he published a similar letter pitching the metaverse as the next evolution of social computing. Since then, Meta's Reality Labs division has racked up over $60 billion in losses, much of it spent on hardware such as Quest headsets, haptic gloves, and AR displays that are still struggling to gain traction. These are numbers that make Intel's gloomy present and future look acceptable in comparison. That said, unlike the metaverse, AI has immediate product-market fit. LLMs and chatbots are already reshaping productivity, education, and entertainment as we speak. The only constraint now is how fast the hardware can scale -- and whether Meta can compete with Nvidia, AMD, and custom players such as Tenstorrent or Cerebras, in pushing the performance-per-watt frontier. Zuckerberg's tone was optimistic, but measured. "The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take," he wrote. The subtext is that Meta doesn't want to be just another tenant in the AI data center. It wants to build the foundation itself, both in terms of algorithms and the hardware that runs them. For now, the personal superintelligence he promises may still be a philosophical idea. But behind the scenes, it's quickly becoming a material one -- with all the heat, silicon, and supply chain pressure that comes with it. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button.

Meta touts 'superintelligence' for all as it splurges on AI

You get a superintelligence and you get a superintelligence. Everybody gets a superintelligence Meta is plowing tens of billions of dollars into GPU bit barns the size of Manhattan Island, and yet The Social Network has struggled to upstage rivals like OpenAI or Anthropic. So, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is moving the goalpost and refocusing his efforts on a nebulous new target: AI superintelligence. "Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves," he wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight." There isn't much consensus on what exactly constitutes AI superintelligence, and despite waxing poetic about how it will improve everything and change the way we create and discover, Zuck's post offers little clarity on the matter. Regardless of what it actually is, Meta not only aims to build it, but instead wants to give everyone their own personal superintelligence to enrich their lives -- after all, who needs friends when you can talk to your buddy Llama. And unlike all the other superintelligences, Zuckerberg insists Meta's isn't trying to put you off a job and instead will empower users to pursue their individual aspirations. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful "Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful," the creator of a social network to rate the attractiveness of his Harvard co-eds wrote. The hype-riddled blog post comes just hours before Meta is set to reveal its Q2 earnings results, and as Zuckerberg faces growing scrutiny and concerns among investors and analysts over the company's infrastructure spending and lavish pay packages for its newly formed "superintelligence" team. As we reported in June, Meta offered one AI researcher an eight-figure payout to join Zuckerberg's team of AI elites. Other reports have said the offers are an order of magnitude or two higher. Meta has also been pushing ahead with some truly massive infrastructure projects. This includes a 2.2 gigawatt AI supercluster in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which will be deployed in phases over the next five years or so. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced plans to deploy several "multi-gigawatt" datacenters over the next few years, with the first, called Prometheus, coming online in 2026. The bit barn will reportedly pull more than a gigawatt of power. By the end of the year, Meta aims to have in excess of 1.3 million Nvidia and AMD GPUs churning away, generating tokens and training models. Of course, none of this is cheap. In 2025 alone, Zuckercorp plans to plow up to $72 billion into capex, primarily to build new bit barns -- and that figure could grow even larger by market close as it reports Q2 earnings. Yet despite these investments, Meta has struggled to compete with more established players like OpenAI or Anthropic. Back in April, Meta revealed its much-hyped Llama 4 herd of large language models (LLMs). As you may recall, prior to the launch, Zuckerberg predicted that in 2025, Meta AI would serve "more than 1 billion people" and that Llama 4 would be "the leading state of the art model." Unfortunately for Meta, the first of these models, codenamed Scout and Maverick, which were met with a less-than-stellar reception, made worse by allegations of a benchmark bait-and-switch. The models were apparently so underwhelming that Meta has reportedly pulled the plug on its biggest and supposedly most capable Behemoth model, which was supposed to weigh in at 2 trillion parameters, and rival OpenAI and Google's biggest models. During Wednesday's earnings call, analysts will undoubtedly be looking for signs that Zuckerberg's AI spending spree is justified and superintelligence isn't the Metaverse all over again. Before ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom in late 2022, you may recall Zuckerberg was convinced virtual reality would take over the world. As of Q1, the company's Reality Labs team has burned some $60 billion trying to make the Metaverse a thing. ®

Meta's year of bold 'superintelligence' bets unlikely to pump profits

July 29 (Reuters) - It's crunch time for Mark Zuckerberg as he pulls out all the stops to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's intensifying advanced artificial intelligence race. The Meta (META.O), opens new tab CEO has sparked a billion-dollar talent war, aggressively poaching researchers from rivals including OpenAI. But as Meta's spending rises, so does the pressure it faces to deliver returns. For the second quarter, though, Wall Street is bracing for disappointment as the company is set to report its slowest profit growth in two years on Wednesday, rising by 11.5% to $15.01 billion, as operating costs jump nearly 9%. Revenue, too, likely grew at its slowest pace in seven quarters in that period, up an expected 14.7% to $44.80 billion, according to an average analyst estimate from LSEG. While Zuckerberg is no stranger to high-stakes pursuits - Meta's augmented-reality unit has burned more than $60 billion since 2020 - his latest push comes with added urgency because of the underwhelming performance of the company's large language Llama 4 model. He recently pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centers and shelled out $14.3 billion for a stake in startup Scale AI, poaching its 28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, even as Meta continued to lay off people. Investors have largely backed Zuckerberg's frenzied pursuit of superintelligence - a hypothetical concept where AI surpasses human intelligence in every possible way - pushing the company's stock up more than a fifth so far this year. But they will watch if Meta further increases its capital expenditure for the year after boosting it in April. Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab also upped the ante last week, increasing its annual capex forecast by 13% to $85 billion due to surging demand for its AI-powered Google Cloud services. "We view rising capex as positive given... Meta can become a one-stop shop for many marketing departments," said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, which holds Meta shares. Lagging efforts from Alphabet's Google DeepMind and OpenAI, Meta launched a Superintelligence Lab last month that will work in parallel to Meta AI, the company's established AI research division, led by deep learning pioneer, Yann LeCun. To differentiate its efforts, Zuckerberg has promised to release Meta's AI work as open source and touted that superintelligence can become a mainstream consumer product through devices like Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, rather than a purely enterprise-focused technology. The strategy plays to Meta's strengths, analysts say, pointing to its more than 3-billion strong social media user base and engagement gains in recent years, driven by AI-enhanced content targeting. Still, Meta's mainstay advertising market is under threat from advertisers pulling back spending in the face of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and tough competition from Chinese-owned TikTok, whose U.S. ban now seems unlikely. Some advertisers may have leaned on proven platforms such as Meta amid the uncertainty, but that will not shield the company from questions over its superintelligence ambitions and how they fit into its broader business strategy, said Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer. "While Meta has seen massive gains from incorporating AI into its ad platform and algorithms, its attempts to directly compete with the likes of OpenAI are proving to be more challenging while costing it billions of dollars." Questions remain about when superintelligence can be achieved, a timeline Zuckerberg admits is uncertain. Meta's LeCun is also a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. "Meta's AI strategy today is more cohesive than in 2023, but there's still a sense the company is still searching for direction," MoffettNathanson analysts said. Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Pooja Desai Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Meta's AI spending spree is Wall Street's focus in second-quarter earnings

Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI speaks on CNBC's Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2025. Zuckerberg believes that new AI talent as part of the Superintelligence unit is worth it if Meta can regain its momentum and potentially create more powerful AI technology that steamrolls the competition, CNBC reported in June. For Meta, Llama 4 represented the company's answer to competing models from rivals like OpenAI, and executives have viewed it as helping the company dominate a potential computing platform of the future. Similar to other Meta-incubated technologies like the PyTorch AI developer tools, the company released Llama to the open-source community, which can then access and use the software for free, subject to certain licensing terms. While the predecessor, Llama 3, was a hit with developers, they haven't taken to Llama 4 because it's seen by some as more difficult to customize and integrate into their apps. That's resulted in many coders preferring Llama 3 over its successor, people familiar with the matter said. Additionally, Zuckerberg lost confidence in his generative AI team and its leadership in part due to a controversy over whether Meta may have gamed certain industry AI benchmark tests, the people said. Llama 4's struggles can be traced back to January, when the sudden rise and ensuing popularity of the open-source R1 AI model by DeepSeek caught Meta off guard, leading to a reevaluation of Llama's underlying architecture, the people said. DeepSeek's R1 is a so-called mixture-of-experts AI model, or MoE. R1 is similar to OpenAI's o1 family of models that can be trained to excel at multistep tasks like solving math equations or writing code. By contrast, Llama's models -- before their latest release - were dense AI models, which are generally simpler for most AI developers to fine-tune and incorporate into their own apps, the people said. AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, researchers say, have been pushing MoE models to power AI agents that can perform a variety of step-by-step tasks. Those companies keep their designs closely guarded from competitors. OpenAI has been developing an AI model for the open-source community, but CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month that its debut is delayed indefinitely pending safety tests and other reviews. Although Meta has previously published research on MoE models, DeepSeek's release to the open-source community wowed researchers because R1 appeared to be less expensive to train and run compared with other AI models, experts said. Suddenly, Meta executives thought they had a clearer picture into how to create their own efficient and possibly cheaper MoE models, potentially leapfrogging rivals like OpenAI, people familiar with the matter said. Still, some staff members in Meta's GenAI unit pushed for Llama 4 to remain a dense AI model, which though generally less efficient, is still powerful, and Meta originally planned on that architecture acting as the backbone supporting improved voice recognition capabilities, the people said. Ultimately, Meta went with the MoE approach, due in part to DeepSeek's innovations and the promise of pulling ahead of OpenAI, the people said. Meta released two small versions in April and said a "Behemoth" version would come at a later date. But the new MoE architecture disappointed some developers, who were simply hoping Llama 4 would be a souped-up version of Llama 3, people familiar with the matter said. Llama 4 also failed to deliver a significant leap over competing open-source models from China, the people said. Executives at Meta as well as the Superintelligence Labs' high-profile hires are now questioning the company's current open-source AI strategy, and have considered skipping the release of Behemoth in favor of developing a more powerful proprietary AI model, the people said. A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that the company's "position on open source AI is unchanged." "We plan to continue releasing leading open source models," the spokesperson said. "We haven't released everything we've developed historically and we expect to continue training a mix of open and closed models going forward." The New York Times first reported that Meta was considering upending its open-source AI strategy. Despite Meta's AI struggles, the company's core online ad business remains strong, and investors are hopeful that the recent AI investments and hiring will eventually pay off. Zuckerberg said in July that the company would invest "hundreds of billions of dollars" into building out the computing infrastructure needed to power cutting-edge AI projects. "Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. Analysts at Bank of America said in a note this month that Zuckerberg's comments indicate "a sign of confidence in Meta's revenue trajectory." The analysts said that his statement also "implies higher future Capex and Opex," which potentially equates to even more AI spending. "We also see the post as reaching out to AI talent, signaling Meta as a place for AI innovation," the analysts wrote. "We expect AI investment to be a top focus area on the upcoming earnings call, and Meta likely needs to make a case for strong AI returns to drive multiple expansion." Meta and its rivals' pursuit of AI researchers echoes the self-driving car frenzy of 2017, when companies like Google and Uber competed fiercely for talent, doling out "similarly crazy kind of pay packages across the board," said Megh Gautam, chief product officer at deal-tracking firm Crunchbase. "The dynamics still feel very much like a winner-take-all-market, so you're trying your best to give yourself the best shot possible to go make that happen," Gautam said. Investors appear more receptive to Meta's AI spending and strategy shifts, a contrast with a few years ago when the company was heavily pushing the metaverse, said Uday Cheruvu, an analyst and portfolio manager at Harding Loevner, which owns Meta shares. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are also trying to hire and maintain talent all while continuing to spend billions of dollars on developing their respective AI models, Cheruvu said. "Now with AI, it's not just Meta - everyone else is doing it, so now the euphoria is much higher," Cheruvu said.

Zuckerberg shares AI 'personal superintelligence' vision after spending billions on top talent

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a letter outlining his vision for "personal superintelligence" Wednesday, giving investors a glimpse into his artificial intelligence strategy ahead of Meta's second-quarter earnings report. The company has shelled out billions of dollars hiring top AI researchers and engineers in recent weeks, and Wall Street will be listening for what Zuckerberg has to say about the spending spree. Zuckerberg did not outline specific products or applications that Meta plans to build in his letter, but he said he views superintelligence as a tool for "personal empowerment" over automation and efficiency. "This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output," Zuckerberg wrote.

Meta's big AI spending blitz will continue into 2026

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech at the Meta Connect annual event, at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, U.S. September 25, 2024. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to continue his company's artificial intelligence spending blitz well into the next year as rival tech giants do the same. Zuckerberg told analysts Wednesday during a second-quarter earnings call that AI's rapid pace of progress has informed much of Meta's recent business decisions, including the company's $14.3 billion June investment into the data-annotating startup Scale AI as part of a revamped AI strategy involving a wave of high-profile hires. AI's swift advancement warrants that Meta have "the absolute best and most elite talent-dense team" that can access the resources they need from a "leading compute fleet," Zuckerberg said about the AI Superintelligence team he assembled for his company this summer. Whatever these top-tier AI researchers build can then be implemented throughout Facebook, Instagram and the rest of the company's family of apps, he said. "When we take a technology, we're good at driving that through all of our apps and our ad systems," Zuckerberg said. "There's no other company that is as good as us at kind of taking something and getting it in front of billions of people." Those AI endeavors, however, come at a cost. Meta on Wednesday said it expects its total expenses for 2025 to come in the range of $114 billion and $118 billion, raising the low end of its previous outlook of between $113 billion and $118 billion. And while Meta is still planning out next year, the company said its AI initiatives will "result in a 2026 year-over-year expense growth rate that is above the 2025 expense growth." Other tech giants are also spending heavy on AI projects and talent. Alphabet said last week during its earnings report that it is raising its 2025 capital expenditures forecast to $85 billion, which is $10 billion higher from its prior forecast. Microsoft said Wednesday that its fiscal first-quarter capital expenditures will be $30 billion, ahead of analyst expectations of $24.23 billion. For now, investors are OK with Meta's big AI investments, with the company's shares up nearly 12% in after-hour trading on Wednesday. It helps that Meta reported strong second-quarter earnings that beat on the top and bottom while providing third-quarter sales guidance that topped Wall Street expectations. It also helps that Zuckerberg said AI drove "greater efficiency and gains across our ad system," likely reassuring worried investors that Meta's big AI spending is leading to some immediate results. And while the company's Reality Labs unit continues bleeding money, posting an operating loss of $4.53 billion in the second quarter, the surprise hit of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses seems to have quelled investor discontent for the time being. "I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI, because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, talk to you," Zuckerberg said. "Once you get a display in there, whether it's the kind of wide holographic field of view, like we showed with Orion, or just a smaller display that might be good for displaying some information, that's going to unlock a lot of value, where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day."

Mark Zuckerberg shares a confusing vision for AI 'superintelligence'

He claims Meta's superintelligence will "help humanity" but doesn't explain how. Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last several months and recruiting prominent AI researchers and executives for a new "superintelligence" team at Meta. Now, the Meta CEO has published a lengthy memo that attempts to lay out his big plan for using the company's vast resources to create "personal superintelligence." In the memo, which reads more like a manifesto than a strategic business plan, Zuckerberg explains that he's "extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress." The technology, according to him, "has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose." Zuckerberg, who has previously expressed a desire to build , never defines "superintelligence." Nor does the 616-word memo explain how Meta plans to create such a technology, what it might help people accomplish or why anyone should trust the company to build it. Instead, he implies that Meta will be a better steward of this non-specifically powerful AI than "others in the industry" who expect "humanity will live on a dole of its output." Left unsaid by Zuckerberg, is the fact that the memo comes at a time when he's been rapidly reorganizing Meta's AI teams. Last month, the company invested $14.8 billion into Scale AI, a move that allowed it to bring Scale CEO and founder Alexandr Wang into the company. The 28-year-old founder is now Meta's Chief AI Officer in charge of its superintelligence efforts. Meta has also been on a hiring spree for the effort, and has reportedly been offering prominent researchers eight- and nine-figure pay packages to come to Meta. In recent weeks, the company has successfully recruited high-profile talent and , including Shengjia Zhao, who helped created GPT-4. Zhao last week that he will take on the role of "chief scientist of Meta superintelligence labs." Just yesterday, Wired reported that Meta has recently turned its recruiting efforts to Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and that in at least one case it made an offer worth more than $1 billion over several years. (Meta PR some details of that report were "off.") All that is on top of the Zuckerberg has said Meta plans to spend on AI infrastructure. Driving all this is that Zuckerberg has reportedly grown increasingly frustrated by Meta's own generative AI efforts. The company has had its larger "Behemoth" Llama 4 model by months. Llama's struggles have also caused Zuckerberg to question whether Meta's AI efforts should remain open source, according to CNBC. It's also likely no coincidence Zuckerberg's rambling manifesto comes hours before the company is scheduled to report earnings and tell analysts more about its plans to spend billions of dollars on new AI efforts. Meta's CEO also clearly sees AI dominance as an opportunity to end the company's reliance on mobile platforms, especially Apple, which he believes have been able to exert too much control via their app stores. In his memo, he explains that "personal devices like glasses ... will become our primary computing devices." A future where smart glasses are more important than smartphones would, of course, be extremely convenient for Meta, which has spent the last several years building

Meta Forecasts Continued Spending as It Races to Build 'Superintelligence'

Meta has shoveled billions of dollars into its artificial intelligence efforts in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, recently opened his checkbook even further for a hiring spree to add top researchers to build a "superintelligent" A.I. On Wednesday, the Silicon Valley company indicated that its spending will continue rising. The company raised part of its capital expenditure forecast for the year, and said the rate of increase in its spending would jump next year, driven by its construction of data centers, which are the giant computing facilities underlying its A.I. push. "I'm excited to build personal superintelligence for everyone in the world," Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement. Meta said it would continue spending as it posted revenue of $47.5 billion for the second quarter, up 22 percent from a year earlier and above Wall Street estimates of $44.8 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet. Profit was $18.3 billion, up 36 percent from a year earlier and surpassing estimates of $15.1 billion. The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said its A.I. investments improve its advertising business, which accounts for nearly all of its revenue. Meta said it expected revenue of $47.5 billion to $50.5 billion for the current quarter, above Wall Street expectations of $46.2 billion. Its shares rose more than 9 percent in after-hours trading. Meta's family of apps, which includes Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, had 3.48 billion daily users in June, up 6 percent from a year ago. Even as Meta spends big, Mr. Zuckerberg faces questions about whether the outlays will pay off. He recently offered nine-figure pay packages to hire A.I. researchers, and in June invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI. Alexandr Wang, Scale AI's chief executive, joined Meta as its new chief A.I. officer. Investors, who reacted skeptically to Meta's focus in 2021 on the so-called world of the metaverse, have been more patient with Mr. Zuckerberg's investment in A.I. Part of the reason is that A.I. has become the focus of the entire tech industry, said Uday Cheruvu, a portfolio manager for Harding Loevner, an investment firm. But there is pressure for Meta's new A.I. team to deliver results soon, especially when it comes to improving the company's core advertising business, said Andrew Rocco, a stock analyst at Zacks. "I think the long-term plan is for Meta to branch out beyond the ads" when it comes to A.I., Mr. Rocco said, including developing chatbots and personal assistants that mimic human interactions. But "what's going to move Meta's stock price is how A.I. is impacting their core business already," he added.

Zuckerberg claims superintelligence is near and will empower individuals

Forward-looking: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has articulated his ambitions for artificial intelligence in a sweeping blog post, calling for a future where personal superintelligence becomes a driving force for individual empowerment instead of widespread job automation. In the post, published ahead of Meta's second-quarter earnings report, Zuckerberg outlined his vision for AI's next frontier, suggesting that the path ahead could help people "achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend and grow to become the person that you aspire to be." He contrasted Meta's strategy with that of other technology companies, emphasizing that, unlike some industry peers who envision superintelligence as a means to automate work on a large scale and allocate its benefits collectively, Meta aims to use the technology to support individual empowerment and personal agency. While the letter offered few specifics on upcoming products, it highlighted Meta's recent acceleration in the AI race. In June, the company committed $14.3 billion to an investment in Scale AI and hired Scale's CEO, Alexandr Wang, who will lead the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs as chief AI officer. The company has also drawn engineers and researchers from leading rivals, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Zuckerberg's announcement arrives at a pivotal moment for the social media giant, as the company seeks to win mindshare - and market share - in the increasingly competitive world of advanced AI. Notably, he stressed the company's commitment to "building personal superintelligence for everyone," describing Meta as uniquely resourced "to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people." Meta's push reflects rising use of AI for personal endeavors. According to a survey from Elon University, over half of respondents reported using AI chatbots for personal rather than work-related tasks, foreshadowing a potential shift in how people interact with technology. Zuckerberg acknowledged the immense cost and responsibility inherent in this transformation. He predicted the push toward superintelligence could cost Meta "hundreds of billions of dollars." He also pointed to possible new safety challenges and the importance of rigorous risk mitigation, while maintaining that "building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible." Comparisons to Meta's efforts building the metaverse, a project that generated significant losses in its Reality Labs division, are inevitable. Despite the challenges, Zuckerberg remains confident about the future, suggesting that if current trends persist, people will likely shift away from traditional productivity tools in favor of activities focused on creativity and connection. He believes that personal superintelligence - capable of understanding individuals and supporting their goals - will ultimately prove most valuable. Looking forward, Zuckerberg emphasized the significance of the coming years: "The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society."

Mark Zuckerberg says AI superintelligence is 'now in sight' -- here's what Meta thinks that means for you

Superintelligence in this context is Mark Zuckerberg -- or Meta's -- term for artificial general intelligence (AGI) which essentially means AI has its own independent consciousness, that is able to autonomously learn, understand, communicate and form goals without the guiding hand of a human. Various AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Meta are committed to developing AGI in the near future. Mark Zuckerberg says humanity is about to advance AI to the level of "superintelligence" and we're all going to be interacting with it through a pair of smart glasses. Which is perhaps what you'd expect from the CEO of the company behind the Meta Quest 3, the recent Oakley Meta HSTN and an upcoming pair of advanced AR glasses. But still, Zuckerberg outlined his thoughts on the future of AI in an essay posted to a plain text website yesterday ahead of Meta's earnings call. In it, he says humanity's newly developed superintelligence should take the form of "a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose." He goes on to say that Meta's vision is "distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output." These are some notable comments coming in the same week as Sam Altman, the CEO of Meta's AI rival OpenAI, likened the development of ChatGPT's GPT-5 model to the Manhattan Project. As Zuckerberg tells it, smart glasses will become our "primary computing devices" with which to interact with the new personal superintelligence his firm is building. Conveniently bundling together two of the pillars of Meta's business model. "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices," he wrote. Meta has been on a well-publicized hiring spree recently, paying as much as $100m to lure top talent away from other tech firms to run its AI development. The company has also paid $14.3 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, a data annotation company that effectively trains AI models at, well, scale. It isn't all sunshine and rainbows as Zuckerberg takes a moment to mention that the arrival of superintelligence will raise "novel safety concerns" and that "we'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source". That's interesting for two reasons. Firstly, he doesn't specify whether "we" means Meta itself or he's using a collective pronoun for all of humanity. Secondly, Meta's Llama LLM is -- according to the company -- currently an open source resource. But the Open Source Initiative contests this because it claims Meta's licensing terms fail the standard. Furthermore, the Trump Administration's AI Action Plan strongly favors open-sourcing AI models although the final decision rests with the developer. So, theoretically, he could be hinting at a redrawing of the map from Meta about what technology it's prepared to give away and what it will keep internal. Mike Proulx, a research director at analyst firm Forrester cautioned that Zuckerberg's vision of superintelligence empowering people may come from donning a pair of rose-tinted Ray-Ban Meta glasses. "Meta's CEO is hopeful that superintelligence will be used to empower people and not be "focused on replacing large swaths of society." But human replacement is already happening, and this is just the beginning," he wrote. "Business leaders see AI as an efficiency play above all else. The fact is that AI can save companies time and money. That's a good thing for shareholder value. But will it be good for society? "As with every major technology disruption, some good will come from it, but also some bad. How bad the impact of superintelligence gets depends, in part, on the ethics of the companies developing it. Meta says it "will need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source" but many companies are vying feverously to win the superintelligence race. But at what cost are they willing to do so? Mere trust in companies to do the right thing just isn't going to cut it." Either way, there's no doubt that Zuckerberg is going all-in on AI in a similar way his company did with the metaverse concept back in 2021. I expect he'll be a bit more successful this time around. And if you want to read Zuck's entire missive for yourself, you can find it here. Of course, the obvious question we all have is whether he actually wrote this himself or if he had an AI do it for him. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Zuck outlines Meta's vision for AI 'personal superintelligence' in new manifesto

Zuckerberg envisions a highly personalized superintelligence from Meta. Credit: Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC / Getty Images After spending billions of dollars to recruit top AI talent from rival AI companies, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shared his vision to "bring personal superintelligence to everyone." Zuckerberg published the manifesto on Wednesday morning, after weeks of a poaching frenzy that convinced AI researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to join Meta's new superintelligence group, dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs. Meta also gained Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang as part of a $14.3 billion investment in the data annotation company. The goal is to develop better AI models to compete against Meta's rivals, which have consistently bested the tech giant on key benchmarks. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg reportedly wants the new AI supergroup to operate more like a startup within Meta, keeping it compartmentalized from the larger Meta "bureaucracy," according to a recent report in The Financial Times. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The Meta CEO didn't get into specifics of his superintelligence vision, but emphasized an advanced form of AI that's highly personalized and empowering. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," Zuckerberg wrote. He also threw light shade on Meta's competitors by saying "others in the industry... believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output." This may be alluding to Meta's open-source approach to developing AI, compared to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic which closely guard the secrets of their models. "At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture." The timing of Zuckerberg's post coincides with Meta's Q2 earnings call later today. We'll find out soon whether Wall Street likes this better than his vision for the Metaverse. You can read the full post at the Meta website.

Mark Zuckerberg says 'developing superintelligence is now in sight,' shades OpenAI and other firms focused on automating work

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now After hiring away numerous top AI researchers from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Apple and dangling multi-hundred million-dollar (or in one case, reportedly a billion-dollar) pay packages in a recruitment spree that's shaken the tech industry, Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sharing more about his vision for "superintelligence." In a new plain text note posted on the web today (full text below), Zuck writes: "Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight." He goes on to share more about his and Meta's vision for superintelligence and how personalized it should be -- in keeping with Meta's entire fleet of products such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and its AR glasses and VR headsets, which all allow the user some level of customization and personalized content. But most interesting to me is the distinction Zuck draws against "others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work," which seems like a thinly-veiled shot at his own rival and poaching target OpenAI, whose definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a precursor to superintelligence, is "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman further recently stated at a conference in Washington, D.C., that AI would cause entire categories of jobs to be "totally, totally gone" calling out customer service as one area where automated AI systems would likely dominate. Instead, Zuck offers a different vision as a counter: "At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well...The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society. Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone." In a video posted with the note on X and other social channels, Zuck says: "At Meta, we believe in putting the power of superintelligence in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. Some of this will be about improving productivity, but a lot of it may be more personal in nature." However, it's actually quite similar to the vision shared by Altman on his personal blog almost a year ago to date: "It won't happen all at once, but we'll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine." And just last month, Altman wrote: "We (the whole industry, not just OpenAI) are building a brain for the world. It will be extremely personalized and easy for everyone to use; we will be limited by good ideas. For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of "the idea guys"; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun. OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company. We have a lot of work in front of us, but most of the path in front of us is now lit, and the dark areas are receding fast." So perhaps, these competing visions of superintelligence are actually far more similar than they are opposed. Read Zuck's full note below: Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight. It seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren't imaginable today. But it is an open question what we will direct superintelligence towards. In some ways this will be a new era for humanity, but in others it's just a continuation of historical trends. As recently as 200 years ago, 90% of people were farmers growing food to survive. Advances in technology have steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose. At each step, people have used our newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible, pushing the frontiers of science and health, as well as spending more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life. I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose. As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be. Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well. The intersection of technology and how people live is Meta's focus, and this will only become more important in the future. If trends continue, then you'd expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices. We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source. Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible. The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society. Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I'm excited to focus Meta's efforts towards building this future.

AI glasses will become your primary computing devices according to Mark Zuckerberg as he ushers in the era of personal superintelligence

In a letter that resembles one of Sam Altman's long rambling blog posts, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes his vision of the future where there is personal superintelligence for everyone, and there's not a single reference to the Metaverse in it. Zuckerberg also delivered the letter in a monologue form via his Instagram account . Titled "Personal Superintelligence", the 600+ word article sees Zuckerberg attempt to stamp his ownership onto superintelligence. "Developing superintelligence", he confidently says, "is now in sight." In words that eerily echo exactly what the CEO of OpenAI has recently said, Zuckerberg proclaims, "I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose." According to Zuckerberg, everyone having their own accessible superintelligence will "help you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be." In a nod to the Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta AI Glasses that the company is so proud of, Zuckerberg says: "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices." Personally, I find this a bit hard to accept based on the current evidence. While I haven't had the pleasure of using Meta's AI glasses yet, I have used AI devices like the Rabbit R1, which require voice commands to do everything, and it's a slow and awkward way to use AI compared to quickly typing a prompt or opening apps on a screen. On exactly when we can expect this new era of personal superintelligence to kick in, Zuckerberg still seems to be hedging his bets a little: "The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society." This battle between AI being used for good or evil seems to be a theme that is playing on CEO's minds lately. For example, Sam Altman recently couldn't seem to decide if he was scared of the power of ChatGPT 5 or in awe of it. While predicting the imminent dawn of superintelligence seems to be the favorite pastime of tech CEOs at the moment, it seems that the technology is building towards a tipping point where superintelligence becomes a reality. Let's just hope that the movies got it wrong about what happens next.

Zuckerberg claims 'superintelligence is now in sight' as Meta lavishes billions on AI

Ahead of Meta's quarterly earnings report, CEO says his company aims to bring powerful AI into the lives of millions Whether it's poaching top talent away from competitors, acquiring AI startups or proclaiming that it will build data centers the size of Manhattan, Meta has been on a spending spree to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities for the better part of a month. In a new memo posted on Wednesday ahead of the company's quarterly earnings report, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg describes his ambitions for developing what he calls "superintelligence". "Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves," Zuckerberg wrote. "The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight." Though he did not provide any details of what would qualify as "superintelligence" versus standard artificial intelligence, he did say that it would pose "novel safety concerns". "We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source," he wrote. Zuckerberg wrote that the company differs from other AI firms in that Meta aims to bring "personal superintelligence to everyone". Other companies are focused on primarily using "superintelligence" for productivity and to automate "all valuable work", he wrote. "The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society," he wrote. Investors are looking for signs that the parent company of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook is spending its billions efficiently. The social media company reports its second quarter earnings Wednesday after the close of the New York stock exchange, and analysts expect a lot of attention on whether the revenue the company is bringing in will help offset the hundreds of billions the firm is spending on recruiting and infrastructure, collectively known as capital expenditure. Wall Street expects Meta to report $5.92 in earnings per share on $44.8bn in revenue. Meta has exceeded Wall Street's financial expectations for multiple quarters in a row despite enormous spending on AI. Wednesday's results will be important to watch because "the cashflow from that revenue is a huge source of capital for all the investments the company is making", according to David Meier, senior analyst at the Motley Fool. "Meta can't invest enough capital into its artificial intelligence infrastructure," Meier wrote. Zuckerberg provided few tangible updates in the memo, but one thing is clear: Getting to this so-called higher level of intelligence will require a great deal of capital. The firm previously projected its total expenses for 2025 would come in between $113bn and $118bn. Of that, Meta said it expected its capital expenditures to amount to somewhere in the range of $64bn and $72bn - up from a previous prediction of $60bn to $65bn. The company has been building out its new superintelligence labs team with talent from competing AI firms. Meta first invested $14.3bn into Scale AI in exchange for a 49% stake in the company, and brought the startup's CEO Alexandr Wang on as chief AI officer. Since then, several reports indicate Meta is attracting engineers and other employees away from firms like Apple, Github and several startups with massive compensation packages - including at least one that came in over $200m , according to Bloomberg. "To win the superintelligence race requires the best of the best talent and Meta has been on a roll when it comes to recruiting top AI talent," said Forrester research director Mike Proulx. "Money talks and Meta has plenty of it - reaching into the company's deep pockets to lure luminaries from its competition with lavish compensation packages, while spending hundreds of billions on data centers to power and scale its AI initiatives." Analysts will be scrutinizing how the company's primary revenue source - advertising - is faring. In addition to looking at overall revenue brought in from advertising - which was $38.3bn for the same quarter in 2024 - analysts will probably be interested in updates on newer advertising efforts such as on WhatsApp. "For more than a decade, Meta resisted trying to monetize the user base on the communications app," Motley Fool's Meier wrote. "But that changed in June when the company announced it would be selling ads, and we are curious to hear about the progress Meta is making."

Mark Zuckerberg is pouring billions into superintelligence -- so why does his Instagram pitch feel so underwhelming?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a new Instagram video on Tuesday morning, laying out the vision behind the company's new AI initiative: Meta Superintelligence Labs. The goal, he said, is to build "personal superintelligence for everyone." Zuckerberg acknowledged that AI is rapidly advancing and that we're beginning to see "glimpses of AI systems improving themselves." Superintelligence (a vague term that typically refers to AI that vastly surpasses human capabilities in virtually all domains, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills) is now "in sight," he added, which begs what he called a big open question: What should we direct superintelligence toward? While rival AI companies focus on scientific or economic breakthroughs, Zuckerberg explained, his vision is decidedly micro, aimed at the individual, not at society writ large. He wants to build a personalized AI that helps you "achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend, and grow to become the person that you aspire to be." It's a pitch that, unsurprisingly, aligns with what Meta has always built: consumer-facing experiences designed to keep people engaged -- and sell more ads. In Zuckerberg's telling, AI won't upend the social order or redefine civilization -- it'll accelerate existing trends. In looking at previous technological revolutions, such as the mechanization of agriculture, which allowed far fewer farmers to produce all the food the world needs, Zuckerberg said that "Most people have decided to use their newfound productivity to spend more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and just enjoying life. I expect superintelligence to accelerate this trend even more." To Zuckerberg, that means a future of AI-infused personal devices -- specifically, augmented-reality glasses that can "see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day." Meta already makes a version of such glasses in conjunction with Ray Ban. The next phase of computing, in his view, isn't about unlocking scientific frontiers -- it's about helping people connect, create, and wear Meta hardware. It's hard not to compare Zuckerberg's parochial vision to the kind of big-picture thinking that once defined Silicon Valley. When Apple founder Steve Jobs described the computer as "a bicycle for the mind," he offered a metaphor that felt profound -- technology as a tool for human advancement. Zuckerberg, by contrast, imagines superintelligence as a pair of Ray-Bans that help you...be a better friend? Even among today's AI leaders, this mission seems strangely small. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks about human flourishing (whatever that means) and rearchitecting society. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis wants to unlock the secrets of the universe. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes AI could be the most important tool in human history -- if it doesn't destroy us first. Zuckerberg? It sounds like he just wants you to make better Reels. This creates a striking disconnect. Zuckerberg has committed staggering resources to Meta's superintelligence effort: a $14.3 billion deal with Scale AI to bring its founder, Alexandr Wang, to lead the initiative; hundreds of millions in offers to lure top researchers from OpenAI, Google, Apple, and Anthropic; and tens of billions more in annual infrastructure spending to power the massive data centers behind Meta's AI push. The scale of the investment suggests world-changing ambition. The actual pitch -- personal AI in smart glasses -- doesn't quite measure up. Shouldn't Meta at least nod to, say, curing cancer? To be fair, superintelligence is still such an abstract idea that even the grandest promises about helping humanity can sound hollow or amorphous. Still, don't even the best-paid researchers need to be inspired by the mission? In an accompanying blog post, Zuckerberg acknowledged the risks of superintelligence, saying it will "raise novel safety concerns" and that Meta will have to be "rigorous about mitigating these risks." He also framed the coming years in stark terms: "The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society," he wrote. However, one might hope a vision for superintelligence would go beyond personal empowerment towards broader societal good. It's clear that Meta has the resources, and the will, to build the infrastructure for the future of AI and superintelligence. Whether it can build a meaningful reason for it remains an open question.

Mark Zuckerberg Looks Like He's Been Taken Hostage as He Explains Plan for Deploying AI Superintelligence

Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is no stranger to bizarre videos. From the infamous clip where he declares his love for "Sweet Baby Ray's" barbecue sauce to the time he was recorded taking a Turing test, the tech founder has long found himself in awkward positions on camera. Still, none in recent memory can compare to a new video plugging Meta's so-called Superintelligence AI lab, which sees the newly dripped-out CEO stare directly into the camera -- and, perhaps, through our souls -- as he preaches the virtues of the advanced AI he's trying very desperately to build. Clocking in at two minutes and 22 seconds, the hot air-filled recording posted to Zuckerberg's Facebook page -- and also, strikingly, to Meta's AI account on X -- sees Zuckerberg make the case for what he calls "personal superintelligence." Defined very loosely both in the video and on a stark-white, Times New Roman-ed letter posted alongside the clip, this supposedly forthcoming technology will, as the millennial billionaire writes, help "achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be." "This vision is different from others in the industry," Zuckerberg continued, "who want to direct AI at automating all of the valuable work." While that may indeed be true, it's unclear from the video and letter how, exactly, the CEO plans to build this personal superintelligence, especially as Meta's current large language models (LLMs) -- at least some of which are built on pirated data -- lag behind others in the field. Although he doesn't mention it in this clip, Zuckerberg has been throwing shockingly large sums of money at poaching researchers from other companies including OpenAI and Google DeepMind to make his rival efforts more legitimate, but there's no telling whether this late-to-the-game special interest will pay any particular dividends. About midway through this video, the Facebook founder claims that the technological revolution has, over the past two centuries, taken humanity from subsistence farming to a global populace focused "more on the pursuits we choose." While it's true that roughly 90 percent of people were, per popularly-circulated statistics, engaged in some form of agriculture 200 years ago, it's very much not the case that technology has improved the lives of everyone on Earth -- especially as it's become more and more energy intensive and polluting, and exacerbated social stratification to boot. By video's end, one starts to suspect that Zuckerberg may well have used one of his LLMs to actually write the script and its accompanying letter, which are full of pablum and platitudes but light on anything resembling substance. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be," Zuckerberg writes in one demonstrative excerpt, "an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be." While we're yet to see whether the Meta CEO manages to actually build some form of superintelligence, there wasn't much in the way of human intellect on display in this clip -- which suggests more that Zuckerberg has already started outsourcing his thinking to AI than that he's building something groundbreaking for the future.

There's a Very Basic Flaw in Mark Zuckerberg's Plan for Superintelligent AI

This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the future of AI, a "personal intelligence" that can help you "achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be." The hazy announcement -- which lacked virtually any degree of detail and smacked of the uninspired output of an AI chatbot -- painted a rosy picture of a future where everybody uses our "newfound productivity to achieve more than was previously possible." Zuckerberg couched it all in a humanist wrapper: instead of "automating all valuable work" like Meta's competitors in the AI space, which would result in humanity living "on a dole of its output," Zuckerberg argued that his "personal superintelligence" would put "power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives." But it's hard not to see the billionaire trying to have it both ways. Zuckerberg is dreaming up a utopia in which superintelligent AIs benevolently stop short of taking over everybody's jobs, instead just augmenting our lives in profound ways. The problem? Well, basic reality, for starters: if you offer a truly superintelligent AI to the masses, the powerful are going to use it to automate other people's jobs. If you somehow force your AI not to do that, your competitors will. As former OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler pointed out on X-formerly-Twitter, "Mark seems to think it's important whether Meta *directs* superintelligence toward mass automation of work." "This is not correct," he added."If you 'bring personal superintelligence to everyone' (including business-owners), they will personally choose to automate others' work, if they can." Adler left OpenAI earlier this year, tweeting at the time that he was "pretty terrified by the pace of AI development these days." "IMO, an AGI race is a very risky gamble, with huge downside," he added, referring to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's quest for "artificial general intelligence," a poorly-defined point at which the capabilities of AIs would surpass those of humans. "No lab has a solution to AI alignment today. And the faster we race, the less likely that anyone finds one in time." Adler saw plenty of parallels between his former employer's approach and Zuckerberg's. "This is like when OpenAI said they are only building AGI to complement humans as a tool, not replace them," he tweeted this week. "Not possible! You'd at minimum need incredibly restrictive usage policies, and you'd just get outcompeted by AI providers without those restrictions." Zuckerberg is pouring a staggering amount of resources into his vision for Superintelligence, spending billions of dollars on talent alone. The company is allocating tens of billions on top of that for enormous AI infrastructure buildouts. What humanity will get in return is a "personal superintelligence" that frees up our time enough to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses -- in a quite literal way, according to Zuckerberg. In his announcement, the millennial tech founder suggeseted that "personal devices like glasses" will "become our primary computing devices" to reap the "benefits of superintelligence." That vision had certain observers wondering: that's it? "I think the most interesting thing about Zuck's vision here is how... boring it is," journalist Shakeel Hashim tweeted. "He suggests the future with *superintelligence* will be one with glasses -- not nanobots, not brain-computer interface, but glasses." "Just entirely devoid of ambition and imagination," he added. The CEO's underwhelming vision of the future certainly echoes those of his peers. Altman has previously described a utopian society in which "robots that use solar power for energy can go and mine and refine all of the minerals that they need," all without requiring the input of "human labor." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, meanwhile, described "machines of loving grace" that "could transform the world for the better." "I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be," he wrote in a blog post last year, "just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be." Of course, there's a nearly trillion-dollar incentive to sell investors on these kinds of lofty, utopian daydreams. But to critics who aren't buying into these visions, the risks are considerable, leaving the possibility of mass unemployment and a collapse of society as the machines render us obsolete. Profit-maximizing CEOs will have no choice but to appease investors by replacing as much human labor as possible with AI. The real question: will they pull it off, or are they hitting a wall?

From Metaverse to Machine Learning, Inside Meta's $72 Billion AI Gamble - Decrypt

So far, AI mostly powers ads and engagement, raising questions about Meta's real endgame. Meta is investing billions in AI infrastructure and intensifying efforts to recruit talent from rivals as it accelerates its push into artificial intelligence. But for all the talk of "superintelligence," the company's latest pivot raises questions of whether this is a genuine push for innovation or another high-stakes gamble. Meta's plan is sweeping and expensive. In the second quarter of 2025 alone, the tech giant poured $17 billion into infrastructure, where CFO Susan Li said 2025's total capital expenditure could hit $72 billion. With even more to come in 2026, a large portion will go towards building Prometheus and Hyperion, named after Titans from Greek Mythology. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg devoted most of Meta's Q2 earnings call on Wednesday to AI. "A lot has been written about the economic and scientific advances that superintelligence can bring. I am extremely optimistic about this," Zuckerberg said during the call, but argued its greater impact could be in helping people lead more meaningful lives. Meta launched a new division -- Meta Superintelligence Labs -- in June, acquiring AI companies and poaching AI talent from rivals like OpenAI and Google. "I've spent a lot of time building this team this quarter," Zuckerberg said. "The people who are joining us are going to have access to unparalleled compute as we build out several multi-GW clusters." The Meta Superintelligence Labs hires read like a who's who of the AI industry, with names including Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, former Github CEO Nat Friedman, and former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao filling the ranks. The team is working on successors to Meta's Llama models, starting with 4.1 and 4.2. "Our Prometheus cluster is coming online next year and we think it'll be the world's first 1GW+ cluster," he continued. "We're also building out Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. And we have multiple more titan clusters in development as well." Meanwhile, Meta AI is now embedded across Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Meta app, reaching 1.5 billion active users. Even Meta's hardware division has latched on with Ray-Ban Meta glasses now featuring an embedded AI assistant. Reactions on X to Meta and Zuckerberg's superintelligence initiative were mixed, with some excited about the future of AI development at Meta and others pointing to other failed projects and scandals. "I mean, with the amazing team of AI researchers that Meta Superintelligence Labs has today, I'm pretty sure we're going to get to Superintelligence soon," one user wrote. "Zuckerberg pitching personal superintelligence for everyone feels like being invited to test drive a prototype rocket car; it's thrilling in theory, but you can't help wondering about the insurance," another said. Still, for all the futuristic framing, the real test will be whether Meta's massive bet on superintelligence produces something other than incremental improvements to engagement metrics. Whether or not Meta's AI ambitions push it past rival AI developers, including OpenAI, Google, and xAI, or sputter out like the metaverse remains to be seen. Earlier on Wednesday, Zuckerberg released a blog post detailing his vision for "personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them." "We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible," he wrote. Despite his optimistic view of the future, Zuckerberg cautioned that superintelligence will bring new and novel concerns. "We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source," he said. "Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible."

Mark Zuckerberg touts the potential of "personal superintelligence" -- and glasses

Anne Marie D. Lee is an editor for CBS MoneyWatch. She writes about topics including personal finance, the workplace, travel and social media. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of AI involves "personal superintelligence" that will help people achieve their individual goals. "I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose," he said in blog post on Wednesday. Meta defines superintelligence as AI that teaches itself and that surpasses human cognition, potentially helping people solve complex problems. Meanwhile, a personalized AI companion could remember a user's wedding anniversary or help plan a celebration, according to the technology company. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," wrote Zuckerberg, who famously co-founded Facebook in 2004 while a student at Harvard University. Zuckerberg's vision of the future also involves something else: glasses. Meta is teaming with Ray Ban and other eyewear makers to develop AI glasses that users can pair with an app to make phone calls, take photos and handle other tasks. "I think personal devices like glasses that can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our main computing devices," he said in a social media video on X discussing the new initiative. Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxoittica said in its most recent earnings report that sales of the Meta AI glasses jumped 200% in the first half of 2025.

Zuckerberg says AI superintelligence is 'in sight,' touts 'new era of personal empowerment'

Zuckerberg announced last month the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new unit of the company that will work to develop these new technological capabilities. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the creation of superintelligent artificial intelligence is "now in sight" and that it will herald a "new era of personal empowerment." Zuckerberg said that Meta's approach will be "different from others in the industry" because it will focus on developing AI superintelligence to benefit people's personal life, rather than directing AI to automate work -- a rising concern as more and more companies move to replace entry-level roles with AI. "AI keeps accelerating, and over the past few months, we've begun to see glimpses of AI systems improving themselves," Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Facebook. "So developing superintelligence is now in sight, but there's this big open question about what we should direct superintelligence towards." "I think that an even more meaningful impact in our lives is going to come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, be a better friend and grow to become the person that you aspire to be," Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg announced last month the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new unit of the company that will work to develop these new technological capabilities. This venture toward superintelligence is projected to cost Meta "hundreds of billions of dollars," Zuckerberg has previously said. The company also has plans to build several AI "superclusters" for the development of superintelligence, one of which is slated to be completed by next year. People have increasingly been turning to AI chatbots for personal reasons, with a survey from Elon University finding that 51% of respondents use large language models for personal endeavors rather than work-related activities. Zuckerberg added in the video that he believes "personal devices like glasses" could be a big part of superintelligence in everyday life, nodding to Meta's development of AI glasses. "I believe deeply in building personal superintelligence for everyone," Zuckerberg said. "And at Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people." Meta is on a recruiting spree for top talent in AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that Meta was attempting to poach OpenAI employees by offering them $100 million bonuses and compensation packages. Altman added that "so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that."

Artificial superintelligence is 'now in sight' according to Mark Zuckerberg and it's going to be really great, but only if it comes from Meta

And a bunch of other slightly unnerving stuff. It's El Zuck, after all. Artificial superintelligence, which is arguably a synonym for AGI or artificial general intelligence, is "now in sight." So says no lesser an authority than his Royal Zuckness, Meta CEO and self-appointed soothsayer on the subject of synthetic thought, Mark Zuckerberg. El Zuck made his comment in an open letter posted on the Meta website and titled, "Personal Superintelligence." The general gist of the missive is that superintelligence is coming and it's going to be great, like really, really, great, but probably only if it comes from Meta. The superintelligence from everyone else? Yuck, you don't want that. "I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress. But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," Zuckerberg says in spelling out his vision for superintelligence. The catch, of course, is the implied threat that you're only going to get this brave new world under the benign AI stewardship of Meta. Everyone else is out to get you. "Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives. This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output," he says. So, superintelligence under Meta is some kind of turbocharged individualism, each one of us able to maximise our agency and potential. Under anyone else, it's the yoke of communal oppression, scratching out an existence courtesy of universal basic income and with nothing of value or importance left to do. Of course, it's hard to take Zuckerberg seriously on the subject of how technology and ethics intersect to the point that you have to question the frame of mind that leads to this kind of post. Meta's track record for placing its own commercial priorities above those of its users, most obviously in the sense of pursuing engagement on its platforms at seemingly any cost, is nothing if not comprehensively established. So, when he says, "superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source," the immediate reaction is, "how about mitigating the risks of the platforms you already run before spooling up something even riskier?" Anywho, the post is worth a read if only because Zuckerberg and Meta are undeniably influential in this field by dint of the huge amounts of money the company is throwing at AI, with an expected investment of $65 billion in 2025 alone.

Zuckerberg Says Meta Will Build Personal Superintelligence for Billions | AIM

"We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a long-term vision to build personal superintelligence, an AI systems that assist individuals in achieving their personal goals rather than replacing work at scale. In a blog post published on July 30, Zuckerberg said Meta will focus on developing superintelligence that "knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them." "We believe in putting this power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives," he wrote. Zuckerberg contrasted Meta's approach with others in the industry that aim to centralise superintelligence to automate all valuable work. "Some believe humanity will live on a dole of its output," he said. "At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress." The company plans to bring this personal superintelligence to its existing products, including glasses and other devices that can interact with users throughout the day. "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices," he said. He also acknowledged the challenges of making such systems safe, especially when deciding what to open-source. "Superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns," he wrote. He added that the giant aims to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what it chooses to open source. Zuckerberg called the next few years a decisive period in shaping AI's role in society. "It seems clear that in the coming years, AI will improve all our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things," he wrote. "But it is an open question what we will direct superintelligence towards." Meta's investments in infrastructure, open models like Llama, and device platforms such as Quest and Ray-Ban Meta glasses are expected to support this shift. Zuckerberg said, "We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products." He added that as the abundance produced by AI becomes more profound, having personal superintelligence will have an even more meaningful impact on our lives.

Zuckerberg outlines Meta's vision for AI superintelligence - SiliconANGLE

Zuckerberg outlines Meta's vision for AI superintelligence Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg penned an open letter today touting the emergence of superintelligent artificial intelligence and how the company will pave a path towards it. "The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable," he wrote. "Developing superintelligence is now in sight." In the letter, Zuckerberg shared Meta's vision for approaching this new possibility for AI and how it will help free people from what he sees as drudge labor. In his lengthy commentary, he discussed how historical trends in technology have disrupted work and "steadily freed much of humanity to focus less on subsistence and more on the pursuits we choose." From his view, AI will be no different. "I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress," Zuckerberg said. He contends that superintelligence should focus on personal needs rather than eliminating valuable jobs. Many AI experts have noted that the rise of this technology will lead to significant disruptions in the job market, and some of these changes are already happening. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently noted that certain categories of jobs, such as customer support, may be the first to be replaced. "Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It's like a super-smart, capable person," he said. Zuckerberg said he wants to make superintelligence personal, by which he means to put it in the hands of people. In their devices, to extend their knowledge and capabilities, similar to how mobile devices have made people superhuman by putting supercomputers in the palm of their hands. Meta has poured a lot of research and development into designing smart glasses that allow AI to see, hear and respond to what people are experiencing and Zuckerberg believes that's the medium through which personal superintelligence will manifest. "Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful," he said. "Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices." While Zuckerberg expressed optimism about AI superintelligence benefiting humanity, his statement also indicated a pullback from offering it as open software to the community. "We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns," Zuckerberg wrote. "We'll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source." This seems to stand in contention with what Zuckerberg wrote a year ago, stating that the company would remain open source with its AI work. In general, when an open-source software product is released, it is made publicly available and can be modified, used and distributed by anyone. Although Meta claims many of its models fall into this category, it should be noted that the company's Llama AI model family has a somewhat overly restrictive license. The Open Source Initiative, a group that oversees the open-source definition, has openly stated that the license fails on multiple counts. For example, Meta restricts users from using the Llama model on critical infrastructure or for regulated controlled substances. The agreement also requires users to license the model if their model use exceeds more than 700 million monthly active users in a calendar month. None of these restrictions work within the open-source definition. Although Zuckerberg will keep superintelligence under proprietary wraps, he concluded that he believes the rest of the decade will be "the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take." Of course, he also added that personal superintelligence will be delivered to the billions of Meta customers via the company's products.

Uh oh - Mark Zuckerberg can see super-intelligence just around the corner (sort of). The battle of IQ vs EQ just got real again

How do you feel when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells the world: Over the last few months, we've begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable and developing super-intelligence, which we define as AI that surpasses human intelligence in every way, we think, is now in sight. Excited? Enthused? Scared? Or just wary that if such a development is round the corner at last that it's going to be under the stewardship of Meta? For his part, Zuckerberg is, of course, excited and on another of his missions. The last one was the 'call me Captain Ahab' pursuit of the Metaverse White Whale. This one has wider implications for us all, although from the Zuck worldview, the glass is very much half-full: Meta's vision is to bring personal super-intelligence to everyone, so that people can direct it towards what they value in their own lives. And we believe that this has the potential to begin an exciting new era of individual empowerment. A lot has been written about all the economic and scientific advances that super-intelligence can bring, and I'm extremely optimistic about this. But I think that if history is a guide, then an even more important role will be how super-intelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other and lead more fulfilling lives. To build this future, Meta has set up Meta Super-intelligence Labs, which includes the firm's Foundations, Product and FAIR teams as well as a new lab that is focused on developing the next generation of its models. This is a dedicated think-tank, Zuckerberg explains, with one goal: We are building an elite, talent-dense team Alexandr Wang is leading the overall team, Nat Friedman is leading our AI Products and Applied Research, and Shengjia Zhao is Chief Scientist for the new effort. They are all incredibly talented leaders, and I'm excited to work closely with them and the world-class group of AI researchers and infrastructure and data engineers that we're assembling. And they're being given a lot of clout: The people who are joining us are going to have access to unparalleled compute as we build out several multi-gigawatt clusters. Our Prometheus cluster is coming online next year, and we think it's going to be the world's first gigawatt-plus cluster. We're also building out Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to five gigawatts over several years, and we have multiple more titan clusters in development as well. We are making all these investments because we have conviction that super-intelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do. Small is beautiful in pursuit of his vision, he argues: In terms of the shape of the effort overall, I guess I've just gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research. And it's a bit of a different set-up than we have on our other world-class Machine Learning system. So if you look at like what we do in Instagram or Facebook or our ad system, we can very productively have many hundreds or thousands of people basically working on improving those systems, and we have very well-developed systems for kind of individuals to run tests and be able to test a bunch of different things. You don't need every researcher there to have the whole system in their head. But I think for this, for the leading research on super-intelligence, you really want the smallest group that can hold the whole thing in their head, which drives, I think, some of the physics around the team size and how -- and the dynamics around how that works. But his brains trust isn't going to be doing this on their own - the AI will be helping itself: I think that for developing super-intelligence, at some level you're not just going to be learning from people because you're trying to build something that is fundamentally smarter than people. So you're going to need to develop a way for it to be able to improve itself. That, I think, is a very fundamental thing. That is going to have a very broad implications for how we build products, how we run the company, new things that we can invent, new discoveries that can be made, society more broadly. I think that that's just a very fundamental part of this. So does Zuckerberg have any doubts about what he's rushing Meta into here? Not so much - and there's no time to lose: At a high level, I think that there are all these questions that people have about what are going to be the time lines to get to really strong AI or super-intelligence or whatever you want to call it. And I guess that each step along the way so far, we've observed the more kind of aggressive assumptions, or the fastest assumptions have been the ones that have most accurately predicted what would happen. And I think that that just continued to happen over the course of this year, too...One of the interesting challenges in running a business like this now is there's just a very high chance it seems like the world is going to look pretty different in a few years from now...we have this principle that we believe in across the company, which we tell people take super-intelligence seriously. And the basic principle is this idea that we think that this is going to really shape all of our systems sooner rather than later, not necessarily on the trajectory of a quarter or two, but on the trajectory of a few years. And I think that that's just going to change a lot of the assumptions around how different things work across the company. He adds: We're continually observing how this works and what the trajectory or the pace of AI progress has been. I think it continues to be on the faster end. And that I think informs a lot of the decisions from everything from the importance and value of having the absolute best and most elite talent-dense team at the company to making sure that we have a leading compute fleet so that the researchers here have more compute per person to be able to lead their research and then roll it out to billions of people across our products, making sure that we build and drive these products through all of the different things that we do. I think that there's no other company that is as good as us at kind of taking something and kind of getting it in front of billions of people. So yes, I mean, we're just going to push very aggressively on all of that. I look into his eyes and I see...well, nothing much other than someone who is phenomenally clever who looks at the world as an academic/technological exercise. I've seen it elsehere, in other CEOs in the tech sector - hi, Sam! - but while focus and vision are vital, so too is empathic awareness and human intelligence and I'm seeing nothing more than some token gestures in that direction. My only consolation? Zuck's last big vision thing was his assumption that we'd all be happy to morph into avatars in a universe that looked like a bad video game from a by-gone decade. That cost him billions, a lot of credibility, but to date hasn't impacted too much on anyone else (unless you're a Meta shareholder). HIs track record at world-building maybe isn't the best. Still he plows on regardless:

Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta's AI Seems to Be Getting Smarter on Its Own

Years removed from the failed promises of the metaverse, Zuckerberg has gone all-in on AI, hiring former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new "superintelligence" team at Meta, poaching top performers from rival firms like OpenAI and Apple, and making deals to build massive AI infrastructure projects. Now, Zuckerberg says that his team has "begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves." This could potentially mark a major step on the journey to building superintelligence -- an AI system that is smarter and more capable than any human. In his letter, Zuckerberg waxed poetic about AI's potential to change the world. It was only 200 years ago that 90 percent of people on Earth were farmers, he reminds us, but advances in technology freed up humanity to focus on things beyond survival. The Facebook founder believes AI will accelerate that pace of progress by giving everyone "a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be."

Meta's Year of Bold 'Superintelligence' Bets Unlikely to Pump Profits

By Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni (Reuters) -It's crunch time for Mark Zuckerberg as he pulls out all the stops to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's intensifying advanced artificial intelligence race. The Meta CEO has sparked a billion-dollar talent war, aggressively poaching researchers from rivals including OpenAI. But as Meta's spending rises, so does the pressure it faces to deliver returns. For the second quarter, though, Wall Street is bracing for disappointment as the company is set to report its slowest profit growth in two years on Wednesday, rising by 11.5% to $15.01 billion, as operating costs jump nearly 9%. Revenue, too, likely grew at its slowest pace in seven quarters in that period, up an expected 14.7% to $44.80 billion, according to an average analyst estimate from LSEG. While Zuckerberg is no stranger to high-stakes pursuits - Meta's augmented-reality unit has burned more than $60 billion since 2020 - his latest push comes with added urgency because of the underwhelming performance of the company's large language Llama 4 model. He recently pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centers and shelled out $14.3 billion for a stake in startup Scale AI, poaching its 28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, even as Meta continued to lay off people. Investors have largely backed Zuckerberg's frenzied pursuit of superintelligence - a hypothetical concept where AI surpasses human intelligence in every possible way - pushing the company's stock up more than a fifth so far this year. But they will watch if Meta further increases its capital expenditure for the year after boosting it in April. Alphabet also upped the ante last week, increasing its annual capex forecast by 13% to $85 billion due to surging demand for its AI-powered Google Cloud services. "We view rising capex as positive given... Meta can become a one-stop shop for many marketing departments," said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, which holds Meta shares. Lagging efforts from Alphabet's Google DeepMind and OpenAI, Meta launched a Superintelligence Lab last month that will work in parallel to Meta AI, the company's established AI research division, led by deep learning pioneer, Yann LeCun. To differentiate its efforts, Zuckerberg has promised to release Meta's AI work as open source and touted that superintelligence can become a mainstream consumer product through devices like Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, rather than a purely enterprise-focused technology. The strategy plays to Meta's strengths, analysts say, pointing to its more than 3-billion strong social media user base and engagement gains in recent years, driven by AI-enhanced content targeting. Still, Meta's mainstay advertising market is under threat from advertisers pulling back spending in the face of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and tough competition from Chinese-owned TikTok, whose U.S. ban now seems unlikely. Some advertisers may have leaned on proven platforms such as Meta amid the uncertainty, but that will not shield the company from questions over its superintelligence ambitions and how they fit into its broader business strategy, said Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer. "While Meta has seen massive gains from incorporating AI into its ad platform and algorithms, its attempts to directly compete with the likes of OpenAI are proving to be more challenging while costing it billions of dollars." Questions remain about when superintelligence can be achieved, a timeline Zuckerberg admits is uncertain. Meta's LeCun is also a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. "Meta's AI strategy today is more cohesive than in 2023, but there's still a sense the company is still searching for direction," MoffettNathanson analysts said. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Pooja Desai)

Mark Zuckerberg Finally Submits His AI Manifesto

If you're an AI CEO, part of your job -- at least as you appear to understand it -- is to write manifestos. These can take the form of a series of personal blog posts, as in the case of Sam Altman, who wrote two months ago about the coming "gentle singularity." We are "past the event horizon; the takeoff has started," he wrote. "Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it's much less weird than it seems like it should be." He talked about AI researchers using AI to speed up their work; he teased major scientific breakthroughs and claimed that the "rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense;" he warned that "whole classes of jobs" would go away but hoped that "we will figure out new things to do and new things to want." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in his own manifesto, titled "Machines of Loving Grace," that "most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be," sketching a litany of risks but contrasting them with the potential upsides of having access to a "country of geniuses in a datacenter." Mark Zuckerberg has broadcast plenty of loud signals that he, too, is a true AI CEO. He has directed his company to spend many tens of billions of dollars on developing models and building out infrastructure. He has inserted AI features across his product line with mixed results. After a stretch of disappointing model releases, he recently began poaching talent from leading AI companies with eye-popping job offers and promises of massive internal resources. Now, finally, we get his take on the manifesto, just ahead of Meta's strong quarterly earnings report: a wall of plain text under the title "Personal Superintelligence." Much of what Zuckerberg writes in this letter will sound familiar if you've read other AI CEO manifestos. "Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves," he writes. "Developing superintelligence is now in sight." Like Altman, he describes coming AI developments as epochal and unprecedented while simultaneously attempting to situate them, in a few short sentences, within the history of human progress. ("As recently as 200 years ago, 90 percent of people were farmers growing food to survive," Zuckerberg writes; "A subsistence farmer from a thousand years ago would look at what many of us do and say we have fake jobs," wrote Altman in May.) Zuckerberg is "extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress" and suggests that AI advances will allow us to "achieve more than was previously possible, pushing the frontiers of science and health," while allowing people to spend "more time on creativity, culture, relationships, and enjoying life." It will also feel familiar in its calibrated attempt to convey wonder, humility, and confidence at the same time, its reluctance to define "superintelligence" despite having breezed right past AGI, and its awkward toggling between what the AI CEO knows now and his oracular pronouncements about what his product might soon mean to the world, and to you, the reader. Writing this sort of memo in this style is, again, clearly intended as a signal: that the various people he's hired to revamp Meta's AI efforts are rubbing off on him; that people at other AI labs declining his billion-dollar offers should take him more seriously; that Meta's pivot to AI isn't a temporary diversion; to the AI world in general that he is one of them. At risk of overstating a formatting choice, to anyone mainlining AI news -- particularly in the context of Zuckerberg's past venues for publishing essays, as Facebook Notes and Threads posts and official blogs -- this sparse, black-on-white letter reads like yet another new outfit for the billionaire: Out with Rogan Zuck, in with "cracked" AI researcher Zuck. It's a clean start, see? Just look at the font! This was not lost on, for example, OpenAI employees: Where the manifesto gets a bit weirder -- even by the high standards of circa-2025 AI CEO singularity predictions -- is when he attempts to make the case that his company's open pursuit of inconceivably disruptive omni-use AI models is different from OpenAI's, Google's, Anthropic's, and xAI's, to name just a few, because it will make "personal superintelligence" available to "everyone": This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well. This is a thinly veiled reference to statements from other AI CEOs, including Altman, who has, in the course of musing about how his company's products might just happen to destroy the labor market, gestured at universal basic income as a plausible remedy. Zuckerberg, too, has touted AI for labor automation, of course, and doesn't explain how having access to Meta's "superintelligence" versus similar technologies from other firms will be more empowering. Like Altman, he seems to downgrade the term from its former common usage -- AI models that are comprehensively more intelligent than the people who created them and therefore present imminent risks of taking control and asserting their own priorities -- to, basically, very useful assistants. His meaning becomes a bit clearer in the next passage: If trends continue, then you'd expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting. Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices. Here we have a claim that, actually, superintelligence slots nicely into Meta's existing businesses of social media (its core revenue source) and augmented-reality wearables (a newer line of business that was the cornerstone of its "metaverse" strategy and has lost $70 billion since 2020). Meta's AI will help you "achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," he says. The idea that Meta is charting a fundamentally different course for AI development and deployment than the companies it's following, mimicking, and poaching from is already a stretch. As has been the case with coding assistance, any monetizable feature that emerges from LLM development will be immediately and almost universally pursued by firms that have tens of billions of investment to recoup. But the promise that a Meta product will be personally empowering -- that it will help you "be a better friend" or "become the person you aspire to be" -- is profoundly unconvincing coming from Mark Zuckerberg, a notoriously cutthroat CEO who is one of the wealthiest people in the world and who as of February had a public approval rating far below Elon Musk's. AI CEO memos are strange and portentous documents to start with, hinting at either a coming era of unprecedented and terrifying disruption, collective executive delusion, or something in between. Perhaps the biggest issue with Zuckerberg's vision, however, isn't one he seems willing or likely to fix: It's that he's the one sharing it.

Here's How Meta's AI Superintelligence Effort Is Different From 'Others in the Industry,' According to Mark Zuckerberg's New Blog Post

The target is to empower individuals with AI, Zuckerberg wrote -- not automate the workforce. Mark Zuckerberg outlined Meta's vision for AI in a letter published on Wednesday on Meta's website that says the company's vision is to bring superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence in reasoning, memory, and knowledge, into every individual's hands. The Meta CEO stated that superintelligence has the potential to kickstart "a new era of personal empowerment" where people will have "greater agency" to shape the world. "I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress," Zuckerberg wrote in the letter. Related: 'The Market Is Hot': Here's How Much a Typical Meta Employee Makes in a Year Meta has made notable investments in its superintelligence push, offering some new hires over $200 million in compensation to join the effort. Last month, Zuckerberg announced the creation of a new Meta Superintelligence Labs team, which featured researchers poached from leading AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. In the letter, Zuckerberg wrote that at Meta, the target is not to automate or change the workforce, but "to bring personal intelligence to everyone" first, and give individuals the power to change their own lives with it. He wrote that "personal superintelligence" would be the most useful tool to help people create and connect, allowing them to achieve their personal goals. This vision, he wrote, differs from "others in the industry" who suggest that superintelligence should first automate all work, and "then humanity will live on a dole of its output." For example, Tamay Besiroglu, the CEO of Mechanize, an AI startup backed by Google, told Business Insider earlier this month that the company aims to use AI to automate every job, starting with software engineering. Meanwhile, other industry leaders have indicated that AI will impact the workforce, transforming the types of jobs that are required. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC last month that AI would result in "fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs." Plus, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted this month that AI would change "100% of everybody's jobs." Zuckerberg also predicted in the letter that personal devices like AI glasses would become humanity's "primary computing devices" because they can "see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day." Related: Meta Takes on ChatGPT By Releasing a Standalone AI App: 'A Long Journey' Meta is a market leader in smart glasses, holding over 60% of the global market share last year. Since debuting in October 2023, the $299 Ray-Ban Meta glasses have sold more than two million pairs, with sales tripling in the first half of this year compared to last year. The company is developing new products, too. Meta introduced its $499 Oakley Meta AI glasses last month, and high-fashion Prada AI glasses are planned for the future, per CNBC.

Meta's year of bold 'superintelligence' bets unlikely to pump profits - The Economic Times

It's crunch time for Mark Zuckerberg as he pulls out all the stops to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's intensifying advanced artificial intelligence race. The Meta CEO has sparked a billion-dollar talent war, aggressively poaching researchers from rivals including OpenAI. But as Meta's spending rises, so does the pressure it faces to deliver returns. For the second quarter, though, Wall Street is bracing for disappointment as the company is set to report its slowest profit growth in two years on Wednesday, rising by 11.5% to $15.01 billion, as operating costs jump nearly 9%. Revenue, too, likely grew at its slowest pace in seven quarters in that period, up an expected 14.7% to $44.80 billion, according to an average analyst estimate from LSEG. While Zuckerberg is no stranger to high-stakes pursuits - Meta's augmented-reality unit has burned more than $60 billion since 2020 - his latest push comes with added urgency because of the underwhelming performance of the company's large language Llama 4 model. He recently pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centers and shelled out $14.3 billion for a stake in startup Scale AI, poaching its 28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, even as Meta continued to lay off people. Investors have largely backed Zuckerberg's frenzied pursuit of superintelligence - a hypothetical concept where AI surpasses human intelligence in every possible way - pushing the company's stock up more than a fifth so far this year. But they will watch if Meta further increases its capital expenditure for the year after boosting it in April. Alphabet also upped the ante last week, increasing its annual capex forecast by 13% to $85 billion due to surging demand for its AI-powered Google Cloud services. "We view rising capex as positive given... Meta can become a one-stop shop for many marketing departments," said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, which holds Meta shares. Lagging efforts from Alphabet's Google DeepMind and OpenAI, Meta launched a Superintelligence Lab last month that will work in parallel to Meta AI, the company's established AI research division, led by deep learning pioneer, Yann LeCun. To differentiate its efforts, Zuckerberg has promised to release Meta's AI work as open source and touted that superintelligence can become a mainstream consumer product through devices like Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, rather than a purely enterprise-focused technology. The strategy plays to Meta's strengths, analysts say, pointing to its more than 3-billion strong social media user base and engagement gains in recent years, driven by AI-enhanced content targeting. Still, Meta's mainstay advertising market is under threat from advertisers pulling back spending in the face of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and tough competition from Chinese-owned TikTok, whose U.S. ban now seems unlikely. Some advertisers may have leaned on proven platforms such as Meta amid the uncertainty, but that will not shield the company from questions over its superintelligence ambitions and how they fit into its broader business strategy, said Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer. "While Meta has seen massive gains from incorporating AI into its ad platform and algorithms, its attempts to directly compete with the likes of OpenAI are proving to be more challenging while costing it billions of dollars." Questions remain about when superintelligence can be achieved, a timeline Zuckerberg admits is uncertain. Meta's LeCun is also a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. "Meta's AI strategy today is more cohesive than in 2023, but there's still a sense the company is still searching for direction," MoffettNathanson analysts said.

Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone to have their own 'personal superintelligence' - The Economic Times

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on Wednesday, said that the development of superintelligence, for which the company has been poaching talent from top tech firms in the US, is now in sight. In a detailed note on the Meta website, Zuckerberg outlined new plans to deliver personal superintelligence powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to the general public. He described Meta's approach as distinct from other technology firms, showing the company's efforts towards helping individuals achieve personal goals, create new things, and enhance daily life, rather than primarily automating workplace tasks. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," his post read. The Facebook founder said Meta's focus will be on the intersection of technology with people's personal lives. He said people will spend more time connecting with each other rather than just enhancing their productivity through AI, which most use cases seem to be focussing on currently. "Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices," it added. The initiative follows Meta's aggressive investments in AI infrastructure and talent. The company recently established the Meta Superintelligence Lab, roping in renowned techies like Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, as well as top engineers and research talent from competitors like OpenAI and Apple. Meta has been offering astronomical compensation packages to secure these executives. Also Read: Money isn't everything: Meta's Superintelligence Labs roundly rejected by some despite tempting pay offers

Mark Zuckerberg speaks of Meta's new vision of personal superintelligence in latest post - The Economic Times

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on Wednesday, said that the development of superintelligence, for which the company has been poaching talent from top tech firms in the US, is now in sight. In a detailed note on the Meta website, Zuckerberg outlined new plans to deliver personal superintelligence powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to the general public. He described Meta's approach as distinct from other technology firms, showing the company's efforts towards helping individuals achieve personal goals, create new things, and enhance daily life, rather than primarily automating workplace tasks. "As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be," his post read. The Facebook founder said Meta's focus will be on the intersection of technology with people's personal lives. He said people will spend more time connecting with each other rather than just enhancing their productivity through AI, which most use cases seem to be focussing on currently. "Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful. Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices," it added. The initiative follows Meta's aggressive investments in AI infrastructure and talent. The company recently established the Meta Superintelligence Lab, roping in renowned techies like Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, as well as top engineers and research talent from competitors like OpenAI and Apple. Meta has been offering astronomical compensation packages to secure these executives. Also Read: Money isn't everything: Meta's Superintelligence Labs roundly rejected by some despite tempting pay offers

After OpenAI And Google, Mark Zuckerberg Sets Sights On This 50-Person Startup, Offering Billions To Lure Top Talent: Report - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Meta Platform's META CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is reportedly on a mission to recruit top AI researchers from Thinking Machines Lab for his new venture, Meta Superintelligence Labs. What Happened: Zuckerberg's Meta Superintelligence Labs is making aggressive moves to acquire leading AI talent from Thinking Machines Lab. The Meta CEO has already successfully attracted several top researchers from OpenAI, and now he is targeting the talent pool at Thinking Machines Lab, Wired reported. Check out the current price of META stock here. Thinking Machines Lab, a 50-person startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has seen over a dozen of its employees approached by Meta, with some receiving offers exceeding $1 billion over multiple years. Other proposals ranged from $200 million to $500 million over four years, with some employees reportedly assured payouts of $50 million to $100 million in the first year alone. Despite the substantial offers, no one from Thinking Machines Lab has accepted the offers. Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, disputed the report, stating that they had made offers to only a few individuals at TML, with the details being misrepresented. Sources told the publication, Meta aims to challenge OpenAI by releasing open-source models that rival those of the ChatGPT creator, effectively turning the technology into a commodity. SEE ALSO: Bitcoin Could Go To $300,000 Before 'Great Depression' Crisis, Traders Argue - Benzinga Why It Matters: Zuckerberg's aggressive recruitment tactics have been a subject of discussion in the tech industry. Meta has been aggressively expanding its AI dominance through its Superintelligence Labs (MSL), launched in June 2025 to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI). Trending Investment OpportunitiesAdvertisementArrivedBuy shares of homes and vacation rentals for as little as $100. Get StartedWiserAdvisorGet matched with a trusted, local financial advisor for free.Get StartedPoint.comTap into your home's equity to consolidate debt or fund a renovation.Get StartedRobinhoodMove your 401k to Robinhood and get a 3% match on deposits.Get Started The company has poached top talent from OpenAI, Anthropic, Alphabet Inc's GOOGL Google DeepMin, and Apple Inc AAPL, reshaping the AI landscape in a fierce talent war. Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Meta's recruitment tactics, which he likened to "mafioso" moves. Altman welcomed the competition, stating a defiant "bring it on" in response to Meta's billion-dollar hiring spree. Benzinga's Edge Rankings place Meta in the 90th percentile for quality and the 93rd percentile for growth, reflecting strong performance in both areas. Check the detailed report here. READ MORE: Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Shuts Down EU Political Ads On Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp -- Calls New Rules 'Unworkable' Image via Shutterstock Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. AAPLApple Inc$211.580.15%Stock Score Locked: Edge Members Only Benzinga Rankings give you vital metrics on any stock - anytime. Unlock RankingsEdge RankingsMomentum30.66Growth32.82Quality77.60Value9.38Price TrendShortMediumLongOverviewGOOGLAlphabet Inc$195.08-0.34%METAMeta Platforms Inc$706.670.95%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Mark Zuckerberg's Personal Superintelligence AI Master Plan Revealed

What if the future of artificial intelligence wasn't about replacing human effort but unlocking the very best of human potential? Imagine a world where your personal AI doesn't just organize your calendar but actively inspires your next big idea, refines your creative projects, and helps you grow in ways you never thought possible. This isn't science fiction -- it's the bold vision Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are pursuing with their new concept of personal superintelligence. By integrating innovative AI with wearable technologies like augmented reality glasses, Meta aims to make this fantastic technology accessible to billions, redefining how we live, work, and create. But behind this ambitious plan lies a deeper story of innovation, competition, and ethical complexity. In this insider perspective, Wes Roth uncover the master plan driving Meta's shift from open source AI to proprietary systems designed for individual empowerment. You'll discover how this new paradigm could transform not just technology but the way you approach your goals, creativity, and personal growth. From the self-improving AI systems that adapt to your unique needs to the wearable devices that seamlessly integrate intelligence into your daily life, the possibilities are staggering -- and not without controversy. As Meta positions itself at the forefront of this competitive and ethically fraught landscape, one question looms large: will personal superintelligence truly empower individuals, or will it deepen our reliance on technology? Let's explore the implications of this bold new frontier. Personal superintelligence, as envisioned by Meta, is a new paradigm in AI development. Unlike traditional AI systems that focus on automating tasks, personal superintelligence is designed to assist you in achieving your goals, fostering creativity, and enhancing productivity. This approach emphasizes individual empowerment over centralized automation. Imagine AI tools that not only help you manage your schedule but also inspire innovative ideas, refine creative projects, and support your personal development. This concept reflects a broader trend in AI evolution, where the focus shifts from replacing human effort to augmenting human potential. By tailoring AI systems to meet your unique needs, personal superintelligence aims to unlock your full capabilities, allowing you to thrive in both personal and professional spheres. Meta's vision for personal superintelligence is underpinned by innovative technologies that promise to transform how you interact with AI. Key components of this initiative include: By combining adaptive AI with intuitive hardware, Meta is creating a platform that integrates seamlessly into your routine, making personal superintelligence an indispensable part of your life. Meta's approach to AI has undergone a significant transformation. The company has moved away from its earlier emphasis on open source AI to focus on proprietary advancements that align with its vision for personal superintelligence. This shift is being led by Shin Xiah Xiao, the newly appointed head of Meta Super Intelligence Labs. Xiao is driving efforts to recruit top-tier talent and invest in state-of-the-art infrastructure, making sure that Meta remains at the forefront of AI innovation. This strategic pivot reflects Meta's recognition of the growing competition in the global AI market. By focusing on personal superintelligence, the company is carving out a unique niche, differentiating itself from competitors that prioritize enterprise solutions or generalized AI applications. This targeted approach positions Meta to address the evolving needs of individuals in a rapidly changing technological landscape. The global AI market is becoming increasingly competitive, with open source models from regions like China presenting significant challenges to proprietary systems. To maintain its competitive edge, Meta is doubling down on research and development while attracting some of the brightest minds in the field. This competitive pressure underscores the importance of Meta's focus on personal superintelligence. By addressing individual needs and emphasizing personalized assistance, Meta is setting itself apart from companies that prioritize large-scale automation or enterprise-focused solutions. This strategy not only strengthens Meta's position in the AI market but also aligns with its broader mission of empowering individuals through technology. Meta's vision for personal superintelligence is part of a broader historical narrative of technological innovation that has transformed society. Consider the following examples: Similarly, personal superintelligence has the potential to redefine how you approach work, creativity, and personal growth. By focusing on empowering individuals rather than replacing them, this technology could usher in a new era where AI serves as a fantastic option for human potential, fostering a society that values innovation and personal achievement. While the promise of personal superintelligence is compelling, it also raises important ethical and practical concerns. Meta acknowledges these challenges and is committed to addressing them through responsible AI development. Key areas of focus include: By prioritizing these considerations, Meta aims to build trust and ensure that its technologies are both safe and beneficial for society. This commitment to ethical practices is essential as the company navigates the complexities of developing and deploying personal superintelligence. Meta's vision for personal superintelligence represents a bold step in the evolution of AI. By prioritizing individual empowerment over centralized automation, the company is redefining the possibilities of AI technology. Through investments in advanced systems, wearable devices, and world-class talent, Meta is positioning itself as a leader in the competitive AI landscape. However, the journey toward personal superintelligence is not without its challenges. Ethical considerations, privacy concerns, and the need for robust risk mitigation strategies will require careful attention. As Meta continues to develop its vision, the impact of personal superintelligence on your life -- and on society as a whole -- will be a story worth watching. This initiative has the potential to transform how you interact with technology, unlocking new opportunities for creativity, productivity, and personal growth.

Meta Pours Billions Into AI While Reality Labs Bleeds Cash | PYMNTS.com

In short: He believes a "personal superintelligence" clipped to your glasses just might be the next smartphone. The Meta CEO unveiled the ambition on Wednesday's Q2 earnings call, framing superintelligence as "AI that surpasses human intelligence in every way." "Over the last few months, we've begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves, and the improvement is slow for now, but undeniable," Zuckerberg told the earnings call audience. "Developing superintelligence  --  which we define as AI that surpasses human intelligence in every way  --  is now in sight. Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone so that people can direct it toward what they value in their own lives." In a companion blog post released just before the numbers hit the tape, Zuckerberg argued that the next decade will decide whether AI "empowers people" or "replaces large swaths of society," positioning Meta firmly on the empowerment side. He likened the coming transition to the shift from subsistence farming to modern abundance and predicted that glasses able to "see what we see, hear what we hear" will become our primary computers. On the call, the CEO ticked off five areas where AI is already changing the company's products and where superintelligence could accelerate progress: Has superintelligence cooled Zuckerberg's open‑source zeal? Not really. Meta's Llama model is open-source, but nuance is creeping in. "We will continue to be a leader" in open‑sourcing frontier models, Zuckerberg said, while conceding that some systems are now "so big they're not practical for others to use" and that true superintelligence raises "a whole different set of safety concerns." While Zuckerberg talks up gigawatt‑scale compute clusters named Prometheus and Hyperion, his hardware unit keeps burning cash. Reality Labs, home to Quest headsets and those buzzworthy smart glasses, chalked up a $4.53 billion operating loss in the quarter -- roughly $50 million wider than a year earlier -- even as revenue rose a modest 5 % to $370 million. For all the moonshot rhetoric, the core ad engine is humming. Second‑quarter revenue jumped 22 % to $47.52 billion, the fastest pace since 2021, helped by a 9 % rise in ad prices and an 11 % increase in impressions. Net income climbed 36 % to $18.34 billion, lifting the operating margin to 43 % from 38 %. Meta's family of apps -- Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger -- now draws 3.48 billion people daily, up 6 % year over year. In Wall Street shorthand, Meta is using today's ad cash to pay for tomorrow's thinking machines. If its bet on personal superintelligence pans out, the company won't just know what you like, it may help you decide what to do about it. "At each step so far, the most aggressive assumptions have been the ones that most accurately predicted what would happen," he said. "We tell people: Take superintelligence seriously, because we think this is going to shape all of our systems sooner rather than later."

Meta's year of bold 'superintelligence' bets unlikely to pump profits

The Meta CEO has sparked a billion-dollar talent war, aggressively poaching researchers from rivals including OpenAI. But as Meta's spending rises, so does the pressure it faces to deliver returns. For the second quarter, though, Wall Street is bracing for disappointment as the company is set to report its slowest profit growth in two years on Wednesday, rising by 11.5 per cent to US$15.01 billion, as operating costs jump nearly nine per cent. Revenue, too, likely grew at its slowest pace in seven quarters in that period, up an expected 14.7 per cent to US$44.80 billion, according to an average analyst estimate from LSEG. While Zuckerberg is no stranger to high-stakes pursuits - Meta's augmented-reality unit has burned more than US$60 billion since 2020 - his latest push comes with added urgency because of the underwhelming performance of the company's large language Llama 4 model. He recently pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centers and shelled out US$14.3 billion for a stake in startup Scale AI, poaching its 28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, even as Meta continued to lay off people. Investors have largely backed Zuckerberg's frenzied pursuit of superintelligence - a hypothetical concept where AI surpasses human intelligence in every possible way - pushing the company's stock up more than a fifth so far this year. But they will watch if Meta further increases its capital expenditure for the year after boosting it in April. Alphabet GOOGL.O also upped the ante last week, increasing its annual capex forecastby 13 per cent to US$85 billion due to surging demand for its AI-powered Google Cloud services. "We view rising capex as positive given... Meta can become a one-stop shop for many marketing departments," said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, which holds Meta shares. Lagging efforts from Alphabet's Google DeepMind and OpenAI, Meta launched a Superintelligence Lab last month that will work in parallel to Meta AI, the company's established AI research division, led by deep learning pioneer, Yann LeCun. To differentiate its efforts, Zuckerberg has promised to release Meta's AI work as open source and touted that superintelligence can become a mainstream consumer product through devices like Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, rather than a purely enterprise-focused technology. The strategy plays to Meta's strengths, analysts say, pointing to its more than 3-billion strong social media user base and engagement gains in recent years, driven by AI-enhanced content targeting. Still, Meta's mainstay advertising market is under threat from advertisers pulling back spending in the face of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and tough competition from Chinese-owned TikTok, whose U.S. ban now seems unlikely. Some advertisers may have leaned on proven platforms such as Meta amid the uncertainty, but that will not shield the company from questions over its superintelligence ambitions and how they fit into its broader business strategy, said Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer. "While Meta has seen massive gains from incorporating AI into its ad platform and algorithms, its attempts to directly compete with the likes of OpenAI are proving to be more challenging while costing it billions of dollars." Questions remain about when superintelligence can be achieved, a timeline Zuckerberg admits is uncertain. Meta's LeCun is also a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. "Meta's AI strategy today is more cohesive than in 2023, but there's still a sense the company is still searching for direction," MoffettNathanson analysts said. ---

Meta's year of bold 'superintelligence' bets unlikely to pump profits

(Reuters) -It's crunch time for Mark Zuckerberg as he pulls out all the stops to stay relevant in Silicon Valley's intensifying advanced artificial intelligence race. The Meta CEO has sparked a billion-dollar talent war, aggressively poaching researchers from rivals including OpenAI. But as Meta's spending rises, so does the pressure it faces to deliver returns. For the second quarter, though, Wall Street is bracing for disappointment as the company is set to report its slowest profit growth in two years on Wednesday, rising by 11.5% to $15.01 billion, as operating costs jump nearly 9%. Revenue, too, likely grew at its slowest pace in seven quarters in that period, up an expected 14.7% to $44.80 billion, according to an average analyst estimate from LSEG. While Zuckerberg is no stranger to high-stakes pursuits - Meta's augmented-reality unit has burned more than $60 billion since 2020 - his latest push comes with added urgency because of the underwhelming performance of the company's large language Llama 4 model. He recently pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centers and shelled out $14.3 billion for a stake in startup Scale AI, poaching its 28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, even as Meta continued to lay off people. Investors have largely backed Zuckerberg's frenzied pursuit of superintelligence - a hypothetical concept where AI surpasses human intelligence in every possible way - pushing the company's stock up more than a fifth so far this year. But they will watch if Meta further increases its capital expenditure for the year after boosting it in April. Alphabet also upped the ante last week, increasing its annual capex forecast by 13% to $85 billion due to surging demand for its AI-powered Google Cloud services. "We view rising capex as positive given... Meta can become a one-stop shop for many marketing departments," said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, which holds Meta shares. Lagging efforts from Alphabet's Google DeepMind and OpenAI, Meta launched a Superintelligence Lab last month that will work in parallel to Meta AI, the company's established AI research division, led by deep learning pioneer, Yann LeCun. To differentiate its efforts, Zuckerberg has promised to release Meta's AI work as open source and touted that superintelligence can become a mainstream consumer product through devices like Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, rather than a purely enterprise-focused technology. The strategy plays to Meta's strengths, analysts say, pointing to its more than 3-billion strong social media user base and engagement gains in recent years, driven by AI-enhanced content targeting. Still, Meta's mainstay advertising market is under threat from advertisers pulling back spending in the face of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and tough competition from Chinese-owned TikTok, whose U.S. ban now seems unlikely. Some advertisers may have leaned on proven platforms such as Meta amid the uncertainty, but that will not shield the company from questions over its superintelligence ambitions and how they fit into its broader business strategy, said Minda Smiley, senior analyst at eMarketer. "While Meta has seen massive gains from incorporating AI into its ad platform and algorithms, its attempts to directly compete with the likes of OpenAI are proving to be more challenging while costing it billions of dollars." Questions remain about when superintelligence can be achieved, a timeline Zuckerberg admits is uncertain. Meta's LeCun is also a known skeptic of the large language model path to superintelligence. "Meta's AI strategy today is more cohesive than in 2023, but there's still a sense the company is still searching for direction," MoffettNathanson analysts said. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Pooja Desai)