The results of Meta’s comprehensive recruitment to achieve advanced forms of AI are finally beginning to come true. According to an internal memo first reported by Bloomberg, the new team led by Mark Zuckerberg led by Mark Zuckerberg will be called the Metas Super Smart Lab (MSL). Meta’s competitors were frustrated, and the team was filled with talent from top competitors such as Openai, Google Deepmind and Anthropic.
“As the advancement of AI accelerates, the development of computers is developing,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era of humanity and I am completely committed to the efforts to lead Meta.”
Zuckerberg has been slow and impatient with Meta’s progress in AI in recent months, and has taken the lead in launching an active recruitment campaign. To attract Openai’s talent, Meta revealed in a podcast interview in June that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that Meta offers signing bonuses of up to $100 million.
Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, will serve as META’s new chief AI officer and lead the MSL team. The 28-year-old recently joined Zuckerberg’s efforts as Meta invested more than $14 billion in AI to tag tags specifically for AI systems’ data. Wang will be with Github’s former head of the company, Nat Friedman, in an X post yesterday (June 30) that the new group will be co-led with Nat Friedman.
“Towards super smart,” Wang said, who said he was “happy to be with an incredible group of people”.
The department will include former Google DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, as well as Joel Pobar of Humanity and Johan Schalkwyk of Sesame AI. One notable absence from Wang’s shared employee list is Daniel Gross, co-founder of Startup Safe Safe Super Smart and an investment partner for Friedman. According to CNBC, he also expects he will join META’s new AI efforts.
Meta’s largest new hire hail comes from Openai. In addition to incorporating researchers such as Ji Lin, Hongyu Ren and Jiahui Yu, who contributed to versions such as O3 and GPT-4O, MSL also includes Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of Chatgpt, as well as Trapit Bansal, Trapit Bansal, Trapit Bansal, Trapit Bansal, a top augmented learning researcher. Other notable additions include Suchao Bi and Huiwen Chang, who helped build the voice mode and image generation capabilities of GPT-4O, respectively.
What are obviously missing from META’s MSL list are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. Three former OpenAI staff recently announced plans to join META. According to Beyer’s X post, their absence is due to “some technology”. He also clarified that the three people who had previously helped to set up OpenAI’s Zurich office did not receive a $100 million signing bonus mentioned by Altman, and that they would not work directly with Yann Lecun, the chief AI scientist at Meta.
As for OpenAI, the company is now reevaluating compensation to prevent more researchers from jumping ship. Wired’s internal information on Altman attempts to assure employees that Meta’s recruitment drive has not managed to measure the most critical talent.
Meta’s way of action is reportedly somewhat offensive and I think things will get even more crazy in the future. “Meta will definitely get some great people, but overall it’s hard to exaggerate that they don’t get top people and have to fall far down on their list. ”
