Meta Disburses Billions Of Dollars To Succeed Meta Super Intelligence Labs

JAKARTA - Meta, Facebook's parent company and Instagram, has reorganized its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts under a new division called Meta Super Intelligence Labs.

This division will be led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of data startup labeling Scale AI. Wang will serve as Chief AI Officer of this new initiative at the social media giant.

This ambitious push comes after a number of senior staff left and received less positive acceptance of Meta's latest open-source, Llama 4, which provides opportunities for competitors such as Google, OpenAI, and DeepSek from China to take momentum in the AI race.

Mark Zuckerberg hopes the new laboratory can accelerate the development of generalized artificial intelligence (AGI) machines capable of thinking more than humans and opening up new revenue streams from the Meta AI app, image-based video advertising tools, and smart glasses.

In the past month, Zuckerberg has personally led aggressive recruitment, by making offers to startups including Safe Intelligence (SSI) founded by Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, and directly contacting prospective employees via WhatsApp with a million-dollar salary package.

Earlier this month, Meta also invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI. In addition to Wang and some of Scale AI staff, the new division will include SSI CEO and co-founder Daniel Gross.

Former CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, will lead with Wang and oversee AI products and applied research at the company.

Zuckerberg has also recruited 11 new experts in AI, including researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Among them are former DeepMind, Jack Rae and Pei Sun researchers; several OpenAI alumni such as Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren; and Joel Pobar from Anthropic, who previously worked for more than ten years on Meta.

OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, briefly said Meta offered a bonus worth 100 million US dollars to recruit OpenAI employees.

However, some analysts fear Meta's big stakes on AGI could be a new risk step for short-term results. Another major division, Reality Labs, has spent more than US$60 billion since 2020, with limited results in addition to Ray-Ban smart glasses and Quest headsets.

Overall, big tech companies are expected to spend $320 billion on AI this year. In 2024, Microsoft poured out $650 million to recruit most of AI's Inflection staff, including co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, while Amazon signed key talent from Adept.

However, the finish line for AGI is still difficult to reach. Meta's main AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said the current method was not enough to achieve the technological breakthrough, while SoftBank's Masayoshi Son estimated the achievement within a decade.