Frustrated by AI shortfalls, Mark Zuckerberg is personally recruiting a secretive “superintelligence group” at Meta to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Mark Zuckerberg, frustrated with Meta Platforms Inc.’s shortfalls in AI, is assembling a team of experts to achieve artificial general intelligence, recruiting from a brain trust of AI researchers and engineers who’ve met with him in recent weeks at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto.
According to people familiar with his plans, Zuckerberg has prioritized recruiting for the secretive new team, referred to internally as a superintelligence group. He has an audacious goal in mind, these people said. In his view, Meta can and should outstrip other tech companies in achieving what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), the notion that machines can perform as well as humans at many tasks.
Once Meta reaches that milestone, it could weave the capability into its suite of products — not just social media and communications platforms, but also a range of AI tools, including the Meta chatbot and its AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses.
Zuckerberg aims to hire around 50 people for the new team, including a new head of AI research, almost all of whom he’s recruiting personally. He’s rearranged desks at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters so the new staff will sit near him, the people said, asking to remain anonymous discussing private plans.
Zuckerberg is building that team in tandem with a planned multi-billion dollar investment in Scale AI, which offers data services to help companies train their models and builds custom AI applications for businesses and governments. Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang is expected to join the superintelligence group after a deal is done. Bloomberg News first reported on the deal, set to become Meta’s largest external investment to date.
The deal will value Scale AI at $28 billion, including money raised, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. At a $28 billion valuation, Wang’s existing stake in Scale would be worth more than $5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Co-founder Lucy Guo would also become a billionaire in the deal. It’s unclear how Meta’s potential investment would impact their ownership in Scale. Spokespeople for Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. The new valuation was first reported by The Information.
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Zuckerberg has spoken openly about making artificial intelligence a priority for his company. In the last two months, he’s gone into “founder mode,” according to people familiar with his work, who described an increasingly hands-on management style.
The CEO’s desire to micromanage the recruitment effort is driven in part by frustration over the quality of and response to Llama 4, the latest version of Meta’s large language model to power chatbots and other services.
The latest release in April proved a disappointment to Zuckerberg, who had repeatedly told Meta insiders he wanted the best AI offering — both in terms of total usage and performance — by the end of the year. His demands piled pressure on AI-focused staff working nights and weekends to achieve those goals, according to people familiar with the matter. Yet the models’ performance has been questioned both internally — by Meta’s own leadership — and externally by developers who saw them as over-promising and under-delivering, the people said.
Meta later delayed plans to release its largest model yet, known as “Behemoth,” which it had touted as superior to competing models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Despite those proclamations, leadership grew concerned it didn’t sufficiently advance on previous models, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Those missteps pushed Zuckerberg to get more involved, and led to his interest in building out the new team, according to people familiar with the matter. He started a WhatsApp group chat among senior leaders called “Recruiting Party” to discuss potential targets for hiring. Members of the chat group have been engaged in discussions at all hours of the day to identify talent.
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Zuckerberg has been compiling his own list of recruits and likes to handle the initial outreach and stay in regular contact throughout the hiring process. He hopes that with the new bench, Meta will see improvements to its Llama models and better AI tools for voice and personalization features, the people said.
It’s not yet clear how the superintelligence group will work alongside Meta’s existing AI teams. Some employees are expected to move over to the new unit, according to people familiar with the plans.
Zuckerberg is racing against rivals like OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to become a market leader for AI, which already underpins a major part of Meta’s advertising business. Already, Meta has invested aggressively in AI, earmarking tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures for projects this year — and what Zuckerberg has assured would be “hundreds of billions” in years to come.
Over lunches and dinners at his California homes in the past month, Zuckerberg pitched AI researchers, infrastructure engineers, and other entrepreneurs on joining Meta’s team, according to people familiar with the plans.
He’s argued that, unlike rivals who are out raising large funding rounds, Meta’s advertising business is strong enough to finance investment in the growing AI space. He told potential recruits that Meta has enough cash flow to fund a multi-gigawatt data center, which would give the company one of the most powerful server bases in the world, according to people familiar with his pitch.
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An investment by Meta in Scale AI could draw regulatory scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission – an agency that is already suing Meta over prior deals to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp.
Other AI investments by tech giants have also been scrutinized by the government. The Justice Department recently opened a probe of Google’s licensing and hiring deal with Character.AI and whether it was structured to avoid a merger review. The FTC under the Biden administration also opened investigations into Microsoft Corp.’s deals with OpenAI and Inflection AI. Nvidia Corp.’s acquisition of Run:ai, which increases the possible workload on its chips, was investigated by the DOJ.
In other AI investment deals by tech giants, antitrust enforcers have shown concern that companies acquiring a stake might withhold or limit access to key resources such as cloud computing from a startup’s competitors, said John Newman, a former senior official at the FTC during the Biden Administration. But in this case, regulators might raise concerns that Meta could limit use of Scale AI by rivals, he said.
“Maybe I’m worried about Meta withholding Scale AI’s product, as opposed to the other way around,” Newman said. “Scale’s work with Meta competitors, coupled with the fact that Meta wants its LLM to become the industry standard, would raise serious concerns for me.”
Llama Drama
Meta’s AI ambitions rest on its Llama models, which power its AI chatbot and have helped train the algorithms it uses to deliver targeted content and advertising to social media users. Meta has also made Llama open-source, meaning the blueprints for the model are publicly available for others to build on. The company’s hope is that Llama becomes the foundation for AI products globally, much like Google’s Android has powered a generation of software products for mobile devices.
But recent iterations of Llama haven’t been well received. Even Meta staffers have felt that some of Zuckerberg’s public proclamations of success have been too rosy. Many users stumble into Meta’s AI products, including its chatbot, through the company’s social media apps rather than intentionally seeking them out, and outside critics have picked apart Llama’s performance benchmarks.
