Meta announced a new division to create an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is as intelligent as humans.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, wrote in an internal memo on Monday that Meta Superintelligence Labs, MSL, will be a dedicated part of the company focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The memo said that MSL would house several research teams that are working on foundational AI models such as Llama software.
It will be lead by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, an American data annotation company that builds training data sets for AI companies.
Meta bought a 49 percent share in Scale AI last month for $14.3 billion (€12.4 billion), with the company saying at the time that it would employ Wang and a few other members of his team.
Meta’s hiring spree
Zuckerberg’s memo included the names of several more people joining Meta from rivals OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.
Former OpenAI leaders Hongyu Ren, Jiahui Yu, Shengjia Zhao and researchers Trapit Bansal, Shuchao Bi, Huiwen Chang and Ji Lin are now being brought into Meta, Zuckerberg’s internal memo added.
Euronews Next contacted OpenAI to get their reaction to the news but did not receive an immediate reply.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently accused Meta of offering his employees $100 million (€87 million) signing bonuses if they joined his company.
Altman told his brother Jack in his podcast at the time that he respects Meta’s “aggression” in competing with the company but that promising “a ton of upfront guarnateed comp(ensation) … [won’t] set up a great culture”.
“I think people look at the two paths [OpenAI vs Meta] and they say OpenAI’s got a really good shot, a much better shot on actually delivering on super intelligence and may eventually be the more valuable company,” he said.
