Zuckerberg announced a major revamp of its AI operations on Monday, putting the company’s collection of AI businesses and projects under the umbrella of a newly created organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, and appointing Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of data-labeling startup Scale AI, as Meta’s first-ever chief AI officer.
“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo obtained by Fortune. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.” He added that the details he would share were about building toward a company vision of “personal superintelligence for everyone.”
The new superintelligence division, Zuckerberg wrote, “includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models.”
For OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI craze with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Meta’s aggressive hiring spree represents a critical threat. OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, described the situation as feeling like someone is “breaking into our home,” calling the talent loss “theft.” OpenAI said it had begun recalibrating compensation and crafting “creative” retention packages to stay competitive.
With an internet advertising business that generates more than $40 billion every quarter, Meta can afford to bankroll a no-holds-barred AI batter even it doesn’t immediately deliver a profit.
Still, Meta’s latest moves carry plenty of risks.
In making Wang chief AI officer, Meta has chosen someone who is not a computer scientist to lead all of its AI efforts—a choice that may not go over well with Meta’s deep bench of AI scientists and PhDs, many of whom have already decamped.
Zuckerberg noted in his memo that he and Wang had worked together for several years and said, “I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation.”
There is also no agreed-upon formal definition of “superintelligence,” though it typically refers to an intelligence that vastly surpasses human capabilities in virtually all domains, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills—exceeding human cognition across the board. Superintelligence is generally perceived as going beyond artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which, though also vague, typically refers to an AI system with human-level intelligence across a wide range of work-related tasks. That is, it can reason, plan, solve problems, understand language, and learn in a generalizable way, much like a human.
Of course, Microsoft and Google are also devoting tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures to build out their AI infrastructure. And OpenAI has said it intends to invest $500 billion with partners including SoftBank in the coming years to build out its Stargate network of AI data centers.
If the race to superintelligence is a test of wills and capital, Zuckerberg seems to be betting that he can outlast the competition.
