Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has been recruiting experts to join a team he's assembling to achieve AI superintelligence, according to Bloomberg and The New York Times. Zuckerberg has reportedly been discussing potential recruits with other senior leaders from the company in a WhatsApp group chat dubbed "Recruiting Party." He reportedly has a personal list of recruits, which include AI researchers, infrastructure engineers and other entrepreneurs. Zuckerberg has invited them to lunch and dinner at his homes in California to get them to join his team over the past month.
At the moment, the immediate goal of AI companies is to achieve true artificial general intelligence (AGI), wherein a machine has human-level intelligence and can achieve any task a human can do. Superintelligence is a step beyond that. An AI system with superintelligence is supposed to have intellectual powers far beyond any human's.
The Times says Zuckerberg has already tapped Alexandr Wang, the founder of AI startup Scale AI, to join the new team. Meta is planning to invest billions of dollars into Wang's company, which provides other AI companies with data to train their models. The deal will also bring Scale's other employees onboard Meta, though it's unclear if any of them are joining the new team, as well.
Meta has also offered dozens of AI experts from other companies, including Google and Open AI, compensation packages worth seven to nine figures to join the team. Some, according to The Times, have already agreed. In his pitch to potential recruits, Zuckerberg apparently said that his company's advertising business can finance its own AI development even if it costs tens of billions of dollars, unlike rivals who have to raise funds first.
Zuckerberg, Bloomberg said, decided to oversee recruitment himself due to frustration over the quality of and the public's response to Meta's Llama 4 large language model. Llama 4 wasn't well-received, and critics argued that Meta overpromised but underdelivered. The company also had to delay the release of its "Behemoth" Llama 4 model, which the company vowed will outperform "GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/meta-is-reportedly-forming-an-ai-superintelligence-team-133030015.html?src=rss
