Mark Zuckerberg is taking matters into his own hands, dissatisfied with the pace and quality of Meta’s artificial intelligence development.
The Meta CEO is personally building a new team aimed at artificial general intelligence (AGI), machines that can think and operate at or beyond human capability.
At the heart of this development is a covert “superintelligence” unit made up of roughly 50 top-tier engineers and researchers.
According to multiple reports, Mark Zuckerberg is leading recruitment himself. That includes closed-door meetings with experts at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, strategic restructuring of Meta’s offices to keep the team close, and eye-watering compensation offers ranging from millions to tens of millions of dollars.
The motivation is the frustration over Meta’s perceived stagnation in the AI space. Meta’s flagship large language model, Llama 4, hasn’t produced the breakthrough results the company hoped for.
In fact, a planned release of a more powerful version, nicknamed “Behemoth”, was recently delayed due to issues about its real-world capabilities.
Meanwhile, competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI are thriving hard to expand their influence, drawing talent and investment with growing momentum.
Zuckerberg is determined not to be left behind. Reports from Bloomberg and The New York Times confirm that Meta is in advanced talks to invest over $10 billion in Scale AI, a startup founded by Alexandr Wang.
Once the deal is sealed, Wang is expected to join the AGI group, which operates separately from Meta’s existing AI research division.
“I heard of at least three instances last week where Meta lost out on AI talent to competitors offering over $2 million a year,” Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das wrote on X.
Zuckerberg reportedly believes that Meta has the infrastructure, data scale, and financial muscle to match and surpass the progress of others in the AGI arms race.
If achieved, the technology would likely be embedded into Meta’s ecosystem, impacting everything from WhatsApp and Instagram to the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and enterprise AI tools.
However, the plan leaves users questioning. How will this “superintelligence” group integrate with Meta’s existing AI teams? What risks are involved in placing so much responsibility, and expectation, on one internal unit? And is AGI even within reach?
The field is divided and some experts believe we’re close. Others say we’re decades away, if not longer, with no clear path forward.
Still, for Zuckerberg, this is a mission.
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