Report: Meta is staffing up a “superintelligence” lab to win the race to AGI
Mark Zuckerberg is putting a team together.
The Meta CEO is not happy with where his company stands in the race for AGI (artificial general intelligence), the loosely defined goal of creating an AI that is better than humans at most tasks, per a report from Bloomberg.
Meta’s Llama 4 AI model has sort of stumbled out of the gate. It suffered from delays, accusations of rigged benchmarks, and the company has yet to release the large, flagship version of the model dubbed “Behemoth.”
According to the report, Zuckerberg is deep in “founder mode” and is personally reaching out to recruit a superstar team of AI developers. The New York Times reports that Zuckerberg is offering candidates “seven- to nine-figure compensation packages” and is trying to poach OpenAI and Google employees.
The plan is to build out a “superintelligence” team of about 50 people, and Zuckerberg plans to sit near them in the office, a sign of the importance of the effort. The team’s mission: to reach AGI before leading competitors, which Zuckerberg thinks will give Meta the edge.
A key member of the team will be Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI, which just received an investment from Meta that could exceed $10 billion, the largest external investment Meta has made, Bloomberg reports. Scale AI provides armies of human workers to help generate training data, fine-tune models, and label images for customers.
Scale AI was the subject of a Department of Labor investigation looking into allegations of employees being underpaid and misclassified as contractors, which was recently dropped. Like Zuckerberg and other tech moguls, Wang was in attendance at President Trump’s inauguration.
Meta’s Llama 4 AI model has sort of stumbled out of the gate. It suffered from delays, accusations of rigged benchmarks, and the company has yet to release the large, flagship version of the model dubbed “Behemoth.”
According to the report, Zuckerberg is deep in “founder mode” and is personally reaching out to recruit a superstar team of AI developers. The New York Times reports that Zuckerberg is offering candidates “seven- to nine-figure compensation packages” and is trying to poach OpenAI and Google employees.
The plan is to build out a “superintelligence” team of about 50 people, and Zuckerberg plans to sit near them in the office, a sign of the importance of the effort. The team’s mission: to reach AGI before leading competitors, which Zuckerberg thinks will give Meta the edge.
A key member of the team will be Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI, which just received an investment from Meta that could exceed $10 billion, the largest external investment Meta has made, Bloomberg reports. Scale AI provides armies of human workers to help generate training data, fine-tune models, and label images for customers.
Scale AI was the subject of a Department of Labor investigation looking into allegations of employees being underpaid and misclassified as contractors, which was recently dropped. Like Zuckerberg and other tech moguls, Wang was in attendance at President Trump’s inauguration.
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