“Meta is creating a super AI lab to bypass OpenAI in the race for superintelligenceMeta is launching a project to create superintelligence, attracting top developers and investing billions. The company aims to
outpace competitors in the AI race.”, — write: unn.ua
DetailsMeta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is preparing to launch a new artificial intelligence laboratory. Its mission is ambitious: to develop “superintelligence”, that is, an AI system that surpasses the human brain in its cognitive capabilities. According to four sources familiar with the internal plans, this initiative is part of a large-scale reorganization of artificial intelligence within the company, which is personally supervised by Mark Zuckerberg.
One of the key players in the new laboratory will be Alexander Wang, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of the startup Scale AI, which specializes in preparing data for training large artificial intelligence models. Meta is negotiating not only billions of dollars of investment in Scale, but also the involvement of part of his team in its ranks. The agreement has a rather flexible structure, which allows Meta to minimize legal risks – the company is currently under the close scrutiny of the US Federal Trade Commission due to previous large acquisitions.
Meta is also actively recruiting leading researchers from OpenAI, Google and other technology leaders. According to informants, dozens of specialists have been offered compensation packages ranging from seven-figure to nine-figure sums. Some of them have already agreed to move to Meta. All this indicates the seriousness of the company’s intentions to regain its place at the forefront of the technological front.
AddMeta has been developing artificial intelligence for more than a decade. Its first AI laboratory was founded back in 2013 – then the company failed to acquire DeepMind, which eventually went to Google. Since then, AI research at Meta has been supervised by Dr. Yann LeCun, one of the world’s most famous experts in neural networks and the winner of the 2018 Turing Award. LeCun is also a professor at New York University.
After the rapid success of ChatGPT from OpenAI in 2022, Meta stepped up its efforts: a special generative AI team was created under the leadership of Vice President Ahmad Al-Dahla, and part of the research work of the LeCun laboratory was refocused on long-term goals.
In February of this year, Mark Zuckerberg stated that artificial intelligence is “potentially one of the most important innovations in history” and emphasized: “This year will determine the course for the future.”
Meta has already implemented AI in its products: the Meta AI chatbot, which has been integrated into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Ray-Ban smart glasses. According to Zuckerberg, more than a billion people interact with Meta AI every month.
The “arms” race continuesMicrosoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic, and Google has paid $3 billion to license technologies and hire staff at Character.AI, a startup that creates chatbots for personalized communication. To stay on par with such competitors, Meta seeks not only to hire the best specialists, but also to open source its models, such as Llama. This step should encourage third-party developers to join the Meta ecosystem.
In April, Zuckerberg presented new versions of the Llama models, which, according to the company, demonstrated performance at the level – and sometimes higher – than the analogs of OpenAI and Google. However, independent researchers later found that Meta’s benchmarks were built in such a way as to make the results more favorable. This caused outrage among the community. According to sources close to the matter, Zuckerberg was deeply disappointed: “He was hurt that people think he’s trying to hide something.”
Meta hopes that the alliance with Wang will return the technological advantage to the company. Scale AI, founded in 2016 together with engineer Lucy Go, specializes in labeling and cleaning data arrays for machine learning. Its client portfolio includes OpenAI, Microsoft, Cohere. In recent years, the company has been actively developing cooperation with government structures, providing engineering support for the development of AI solutions.
Wang is well acquainted with the top of the technology world. He lived in the same house with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and during Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, they were photographed together at the Capitol. The next day, Scale AI published an open letter in The Washington Post in which Wang called on Trump to invest in AI in order not to lag behind China: “Dear President Trump, America must win the war with artificial intelligence.”
Meta seeks to realize this challenge – albeit not without reservations. The company understands that the stakes are too high. Superintelligence is not just a technology, but a potential point of no return for civilization. And Meta wants to be among those who control it.
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