Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hired away AI experts from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to create Meta Superintelligence Labs, a supergroup that will allegedly give Meta the ability to develop frontier models that "deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone."
In a memo published by CNBC and first reported by Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said Meta will put all of its AI groups under Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Meta is committed to Llama 4.1 and Llama 4.2 and will pursue next-gen models with the new group, which will be led by Alexandr Wang, who was the ScaleAI CEO. Nat Friedman will partner with Wang to lead the new group. Friedman, who led GitHub at Microsoft, will lead work on AI products on applied research for MSL.
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Zuckerberg named another 11 AI leads from Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic. Wall Street is cheering the hiring spree, but super teams don't always deliver. Here's a look at the challenges MSL will face:
Time. Meta is clearly playing catch up or it wouldn't be hiring so heavily and paying out what is likely vast sums to poach AI experts. Zuckerberg said MSL will begin work on next-gen models in the next year. If you assume, work started today it's an open question of whether Meta can realistically close the gap with rivals that aren't exactly standing still.
Management. Many people--including investors--saw Zuckerberg's hiring spree as a positive development. I saw a lot of egos to manage and it may take time Meta doesn't have for MSL to gel as a team.
Llama, open source and developers. Meta didn't do the open source riff that usually appears when the company talks AI. It remains to be seen what the approach is with MSL, but Zuckerberg has spent a lot of money to be on the frontier. He'll want to keep the spoils.
Meta has money, but it's unclear if it's uniquely positioned. Zuckerberg said: "We have a strong business that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs. We have deeper experience building and growing products that reach billions of people," said Zuckerberg in his memo. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and much of the field can say the same.
ROI. Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars on the metaverse and AI served as a nice distraction from the lack of ROI. Facebook and Instagram look tired relative to TikTok. It's possible that Meta's core businesses remain great, but the company faces the same ad disruption as the rest of the field.
