Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI ‘superintelligence’ super-group

In a memo to Meta staff, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new “Meta Superintelligence Labs” group that will head up its AI work, Bloomberg reports.

Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta as part of a multibillion dollar deal earlier this month, will head up the group as the company’s chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will “partner with” Wang to help lead the division, according to Bloomberg. Meta has also made 11 new AI-focused hires, including former Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI employees. 

Zuckerberg has been making huge offers to potential hires – The Verge’s Alex Heath has reported that they’re “well into the eight-figure range” – to bolster its AI efforts, which have fallen behind other big AI companies. Meta has also held talks to buy companies like Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, Perplexity, and Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, though “none of these talks progressed to the formal offer stage for various reasons,” Heath reported.

Meta is also planning to “start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so,” Zuckerberg said in the memo, which was published in full by CNBC.