Meta (the company that owns Facebook and Instagram) is starting a new division to focus on powerful artificial intelligence (AI). This team will be led by Alexandr Wang, who used to be the CEO of a company called Scale AI. He will now be Meta’s Chief AI Officer.
This move comes after some problems for Meta. Many top employees left recently, and their latest AI model, Llama 4, didn’t get good feedback. This allowed competitors like Google, OpenAI, and a Chinese company called DeepSeek to move ahead in the AI race.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants this new division to speed up work on a very advanced kind of AI, called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — a type of AI that could be smarter than humans. He also hopes this will help make money from AI tools, like the Meta AI app, ads created from pictures and videos, and smart glasses.
Meta Creates New AI Division Led by Alexandr Wang
In the past month, Zuckerberg personally tried to hire top AI talent. He even contacted people through WhatsApp and offered them big pay packages worth millions of dollars. He also tried to hire people from a startup called SSI, which was co-founded by OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever.
Meta recently invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. The new team will also include Daniel Gross (SSI’s co-founder) and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Friedman will work with Wang to lead the Superintelligence Labs and develop new AI products.
Meta also hired 11 more top AI experts from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Some of them include:
Jack Rae and Pei Sun (formerly from DeepMind)
Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren (from OpenAI)
Joel Pobar (from Anthropic, who also worked at Meta for 10+ years)
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, recently said Meta was offering bonuses of $100 million to try and hire his staff.
However, some experts are worried. They think Meta’s big investment in AGI might not bring quick results, just like their Reality Labs project (for VR and AR), which has already cost over $60 billion since 2020, with only a few products like smart glasses and Quest headsets released.
This year alone, big tech companies are expected to spend $320 billion on AI. In 2024, Microsoft hired most of the staff from Inflection AI for $650 million, and Amazon also hired top people from another company called Adept.
But the dream of AGI is still far away. Meta’s own AI scientist, Yann LeCun, says today’s technology is not enough to achieve it. Meanwhile, SoftBank’s CEO thinks AGI could happen in the next 10 years.
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