Onboarding at Meta just got surreal: new recruits in the AI division find themselves seated next to Mark Zuckerberg himself. According to Bloomberg, Zuck is handpicking a core group to spearhead a brand-new research hub aimed at creating AI that not only rivals human intelligence but surpasses it—a level often dubbed “superintelligence.”
A $10 Billion Bet on Scale AI
Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI, to head this audacious project, The New York Times reports. This move coincides with Meta’s plan to inject roughly $10 billion into Scale AI over the coming year. Scale AI’s bread-and-butter is helping organizations—among them OpenAI and Microsoft—streamline their own AI development pipelines.
Moving Beyond AGI
Most of Silicon Valley’s heavyweights are racing toward “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)—systems that match human cognitive abilities. Meta’s gambit is to vault beyond that plateau. If successful, they’d own technology demonstrably “smarter” than any human brain.
Pressure to Scale
OpenAI’s recent hiccups underscore how far we are from seamless, large-scale AGI deployment. Yesterday’s partial ChatGPT outage generated unusual delays and error messages—a sort of digital “brain freeze.” Back in March, a surge in requests for Studio Ghibli–style selfies even led Sam Altman to quip that the system’s “GPUs are melting.”
Those bottlenecks hint at an opening: any company willing to underwrite multibillion-dollar gambles on next-generation AI could leapfrog the stuttering field.
Meta’s AI Investments in Context
- Scale AI: Meta’s proposed $10 billion commitment would be its largest outside investment in AI to date. Until now, it has channeled its AI budget almost entirely into in-house projects like the Llama family of language models and the Meta AI app.
- DeepMind Missed Opportunity: In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind for $600 million—an acquisition that has become central to its AI roadmap. Meta was notably absent from that deal.
- Rivals’ Stakes: Amazon has earmarked $8 billion for Anthropic; Microsoft has already plowed $13 billion into OpenAI; and Apple, while active, has taken a more modest approach.
The Hunt for Top Talent
Securing world-class AI researchers has become as pivotal as any chip or algorithm. Meta reportedly dispatches offers in the seven- to nine-figure range to entice experts away from Morgan Stanley rival firms like OpenAI and Google. Yet even those sky-high figures aren’t always enough: both OpenAI and Google continue to reclaim talent, thanks to their own multibillion-dollar recruiting budgets. Last year alone, Google spent an estimated $3 billion on hiring, executive packages, and licensing deals with outfits such as Character.AI. In this battlefield, human resources strategies could determine who ultimately “wins” the AI arms race.
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