Meta Invests Billions in AI Overhaul, Hires Top Talent

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a significant restructuring of the company's AI efforts in a memo to staff. This overhaul includes the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a new division that consolidates all AI-related teams and initiatives. MSL will be co-led by ex-Scale CEO and cofounder Alexandr Wang, who is becoming Meta’s “Chief AI Officer,” and ex-GitHub CEO and AI investor Nat Friedman. The explicit aim of this restructuring is to build “personal superintelligence for everyone,” which refers to AI that can perform beyond human level at most cognitive tasks.

Meta is aggressively investing in AI talent, poaching top researchers from rival companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The company is offering unprecedented signing bonuses, reportedly up to $100 million, to secure key hires. Meta has also invested heavily in AI-focused ventures, including $14.3 billion into Scale AI and billions into Friedman’s AI-focused venture capital firm. This hiring spree follows rebuffed attempts to acquire key AI startups, including former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s company Safe Superintelligence and Perplexity AI.

Meta’s latest Llama AI model family, Llama 4, has underperformed expectations, facing criticism for misleading benchmark figures and repeated delays in the release of its largest model, Llama 4 Behemoth. The company has not yet debuted models with “reasoning” capabilities, losing ground to rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and Alibaba’s Qwen. This has led to internal debate about Meta’s AI direction and increased urgency to revitalize its AI portfolio. Additionally, Meta has suffered from the loss of key Llama researchers to competitors, further increasing the need to attract and retain world-class AI talent. The company also faces ongoing legal and ethical scrutiny over data practices.

Meta is investing tens of billions in infrastructure, data centers, and custom hardware to secure a leading role in the AI era. This includes spending between $64 billion and $72 billion on data centers to handle AI workloads this year, up from just $28 billion in annual capital spending in 2023. Zuckerberg has largely staked Meta’s future on AI, emphasizing the company's commitment to leading the way in developing superintelligence. The new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development are expected to set Meta up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone.