Meta Superintelligence Labs: Mark Zuckerberg launches his own AI company with a mercenary force

After weeks of trying to recruit top AI researchers, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg (41) has unveiled the outlines of his new AI company. Called Meta Superintelligence Labs, it will become part of his tech giant, which operates three of the world's largest social media platforms: Facebook, Meta, and WhatsApp. "I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure Meta leads the way," Zuckerberg stated in a memo. With this, he is once again ramping up his own ambitions – positioning Meta as a direct competitor to Google , Anthropic, and, above all, the ChatGPT company OpenAI .

Zuckerberg explained that the new AI unit will consist of various teams across the company, continuing to work on core models like Meta's existing open-source software Llama, as well as on new products and fundamental research projects for artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg stated that the lab should be at the forefront of the AI ​​scene "within the next year or so."

To staff the new unit with top-notch talent, Zuckerberg recently launched a kind of super-recruitment campaign , often pitching for a move to Meta in personal meetings. He courted top researchers like former OpenAI lead developer Ilya Sutskever (38), who now runs his own multi-billion dollar AI company, Safe Superintelligence. Meta is said to have lured some with signing bonuses of up to $100 million and top salaries of a similar amount, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (40) recently reported in a podcast. Other top OpenAI executives have even recently referred to the poaching attempts as a "raid." Now it's clear what the new Meta unit will look like in terms of personnel.

The superintelligence lab is headed by Alexander Wang (28), the former CEO of Scale AI. Zuckerberg had only invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI at the beginning of June. Even more important to Zuckerberg than the 49 percent stake he secured in the company as part of the deal was apparently the personnel component. With the investment, he secured the services of Wang and several of his colleagues. He was said to have hired Wang as a "wartime CEO" for his AI campaign. "Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him the most impressive founder of his generation," Zuckerberg himself stated in his memo. "He has a clear sense of the historical significance of superintelligence."

Co-head of the new unit will be Nat Friedman (47), who was CEO of the Microsoft subsidiary Github until 2021 and has since run one of the most active AI investment funds in the US. Friedman will primarily focus on product development and applied research. The previous head of Meta's AI initiatives, prominent Frenchman Yann LeCun (64), plays no role in Zuckerberg's personnel roster.

"I've spent the last few months meeting with top leaders from Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to assemble the founding group for this small, specialized project," Zuckerberg wrote in the memo, announcing further commitments. "We're still in the process of forming this group, and we'll be asking several people from across the AI ​​organization to join this lab as well." Daniel Gross (38), business partner of new co-CEO Friedman and previously CEO of Sutskever's AI lab Safe Superintelligence, is also said to have joined Meta; this has not yet been confirmed.

But Zuckerberg is already proud that he has poached several top people from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic with his multi-million dollar offers and lured them to Meta. What some observers describe as a mercenary force is intended to become a kind of all-star team for Zuckerberg. He named several people by name in his memo, including seven leading OpenAI developers.

• Trapit Bansal – Pioneer in AI research and co-inventor of the ChatGPT-o models at OpenAI.

• Shuchao Bi – Co-inventor of the speech mode of GPT-4o and o4-mini. Previously, he led multimodal retraining at OpenAI.

• Huiwen Chang – Co-inventor of GPT-4o image generation at OpenAI and previously inventor of the MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.

• Hongyu Ren – Co-inventor of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3, and o4-mini. Previously, he led a post-training group at OpenAI.

• Jiahui Yu – Co-inventor of several ChatGPT models. Previously, he led the perception team at OpenAI and co-led multimodal development at Google's Gemini.

• Shengjia Zhao – Co-inventor of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and all mini models. Previously, she led the synthetic data practice at OpenAI.

• Ji Lin – Developer building various ChatGPT models at OpenAI.

• Joel Pobar – Developer at Anthropic, who previously worked as a machine learning expert at Meta for eleven years.

• Jack Rae – Technical Lead for Pre-Training and Reasoning on Google's Gemini model. Led the early language modeling efforts of Gopher and Chinchilla at DeepMind.

• Pei Sun – Post-training, coding, and reasoning developer for Gemini at Google DeepMind. Previously, he developed the last two generations of perception models at the robot car company Waymo.

• Johan Schalkwyk – former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.

Some observers are skeptical that Meta will succeed with this expensive approach. Zuckerberg has invested around $60 billion in his last big venture, the Reality Lab, since 2020 – and has so far achieved rather modest results with his smart glasses. Zuckerberg, however, believes that with this team, he can catch up with OpenAI and Google, especially because Meta has strong foundations from its other business. "Meta is in a unique position to deliver superintelligence to the world." The strong other business, with its billions in advertising profits, gives Meta the advantage of being able to more easily build significantly more computing power for developing and training new AI models than its competitors from smaller AI labs could. It was recently announced that Meta also apparently intends to raise $29 billion from investors to build gigantic AI data centers.

"We have extensive experience building and developing products that reach billions of people," Zuckerberg said enthusiastically. "We are pioneers and leaders in the AI ​​eyewear and wearables category. And our corporate structure allows us to act with far greater conviction and boldness."