Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg on Monday unveiled a restructuring of the company’s AI operations as it pursues what he dubbed “superintelligence,” – and Wall Street cheered by pushing the stock to another all-time high.
Zuckerberg, 41, told employees that the newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs will be spearheaded by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who joined the Big Tech giant after Zuckerberg spent nearly $15 billion for a 49% stake in the startup.
“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg said in an internal message to employees first obtained by Bloomberg. A Meta source confirmed the report.
“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.
Zuckerberg said Wang, who will serve as chief AI officer, was the “most impressive founder of his generation,” according to the memo.
Wang will work close with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who will oversee AI products and applied research.
Investors sent the Facebook and Instagram parent to as high as $747.90 in intraday trading, before dipping down to about $738 a share, up 0.6%, as of 3:15 p.m. ET.
The company set its previous high of $733.63 on Friday and is up 23% YTD, putting its valuation at approximately $1.86 trillion — the sixth-most in the world.
Meta is competing against the likes of Google and Sam Altman’s OpenAI in the race to develop advanced AI. Zuckerberg favors an “open-source” AI model, meaning that they are publicly available for anyone to use, while Google and OpenAI each have closed-source models.
In his memo, Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta had poached four more OpenAI researchers – Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren. In total, the billionaire announced 11 new hires, including ex-employees of rivals Google and Anthropic.
Altman has publicly grumbled about Zuckerberg’s recruiting push – claiming on a podcast earlier this month that the Facebook founder had offered $100 million signing bonuses in its efforts to lure OpenAI talent.
Top Meta executive Andrew Bosworth reportedly pushed back during a recent all-hands meeting, telling employees that Altman was being “dishonest” about the extent of the offers.
Another former OpenAI researcher Lucas Beyer recently confirmed in an X post that he and colleagues Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai were lured away by Zuckerberg.
However, Byers noted that the trio “did not get 100M sign-on, that’s fake news.”
Key OpenAI researcher Trapit Bansal – a main contributor to OpenAI’s first-ever AI reasoning model o1 – has also joined Meta.
